i^ \^ i_^n I >i 1 1-^ 



BY 

AUSTIN DOBSON 



Ipsd varietate tentamus efficere, ut alia 
aliis, quoedam fortasse omnibus placean 

Pliny to Paternus 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1898 



\'^\f^ 



18502 



Copyright, 1898, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 




WOCGP!t;>fitCtlV£D. 



Sambetsitg Press: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



Oliver Goldsmith. 



/ 



/i- 

CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Goldsmith's Poems and Plays 7 

Angelo's "Reminiscences" 33 

The Latest Life of Steele 57 

The Author of "Monsieur Tonson " ... 87 

Boswell's Predecessors and Editors . . . 109 

An English Engraver in Paris 144 

The "Vicar of Wakefield" and its Illus- 
trators '..../... 165 

Old Whitehall 183 

Luttrell's " Letters to Julia " 203 

Changes at Charing Cross 220 

John Gay 239 

At Leicester Fields 275 

Marteilhe's "Memoirs" 306 



MISCELLANIES 



GOLDSMITH'S POEMS AND PLAYS. 

THIRTY years of taking-in; fifteen years 
of giving-out ; — that, in brief, is Oliver 
Goldsmitli's story. When, in 1758, his failure 
to pass at Surgeons' Hall finally threw him on 
letters for a living, the thirty years were finished, 
and the fifteen years had been begun. What 
was to come he knew not ; but, from his bare- 
walled lodging in Green-Arbour-Court, he could 
at least look back upon a sufficiently diversified 
past. He had been an idle, orchard-robbing 
schoolboy ; a tuneful but intractable sizar of 
Trinity ; a lounging, loitering, fair-haunting, 
flute-playing Irish '* buckeen." He had knocked 
at the doors of both Law and Divinity, and 
crossed the threshold of neither. He had 
set out for London and stopped at Dublin ; he 
had started for America and arrived at Cork. 
He had been many things : a medical student, 
a strolling musician, an apothecary, a corrector 



8 Miscellanies. 

of the press, an usher at a Peckham *• academy." 
Judged by ordinary standards, he had wantonly 
wasted his time. And yet, as things fell out, it 
is doubtful whether his parti-coloured experi- 
ences were not of more service to him than any 
he could have obtained if his progress had beery 
less erratic. Had he fulfilled the modest expec- 
tations of his family, he would probably have 
remained a simple curate in Westmeath, eking 
out his " forty pounds a year " by farming a field 
or two, migrating contentedly at the fitting sea- 
son from the " blue bed to the brown," and (il 
may be) subsisting vaguely as a local poet upon 
the tradition of some youthful couplets to a, 
pretty cousin, who had married a richer man. 
As it was, if he could not be said to have " seen 
life steadily, and seen it whole," he had, at all 
events, inspected it pretty closely in parts ; and, 
at a time when he was most impressible, had pre- 
served the impress of many things, which, in his 
turn, he was to re-impress upon his writings. 
** No man" — says one of his biographers^ — 
*' ever put so much of himself into his books as 
Goldsmith." To his last hour he was drawing 
upon the thoughts and reviving the memories of 
that "unhallowed time" when, to all appear- 
ance, he was hopelessly squandering his oppor- 
1 Forster's Lt/e, Bk. ii., ch. vi. 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 9 

tunities. To do as Goldsmith did would 
scarcely enable a man to write a ^' Vicar of 
Wakefield" or a "Deserted Village," — cer- 
tainly his practice cannot be preached with 
safety " to those that eddy round and round." 
But viewing his entire career, it is difficult not 
to see how one part seems to have been an in- 
dispensable preparation for the other, and to 
marvel once more (with the philosopher Square) 
at '*the eternal Fitness of Things." 

The events of Goldsmith's life have been 
too often narrated to need repetition, and we 
shall not resort to the well-worn device of re- 
peating them in order to say so. But the prog- 
ress of time, advancing some things and effacing 
others, lends a fresh aspect even to master- 
pieces ; for which reason it is always possible to 
speak, of a writer's work. In this instance we 
shall restrict ourselves to Goldsmith's Poems 
and Plays. And, with regard to both, what 
strikes one first is the extreme tardiness of that 
late blossoming upon which Johnson commented. 
When a man succeeds as Goldsmith succeeded, 
friends and critics speedily discover that he had 
shown signs of excellence even from his boyish 
years. But setting aside those half-mythical 
ballads for the Dublin street-singers, and some 



10 Miscellanies. 

doubtful verses for Jane Contarine, there is no 
definite evidence that, from a doggerel couplet 
in his childhood to an epigram not much better 
than doggerel composed when he was five and 
twenty, he had written a line of verse of the 
slightest importance ; and even five years later, 
although he refers to himself in a private letter 
as a ** poet," it must have been solely upon the 
strength of the unpublished fragment of '' The 
Traveller," which, in the interval, he had sent to 
his brother Henry from abroad. It is even more 
remarkable that — although so skilful a corre- 
spondent must have been fully sensible of his 
gifts — until under the pressure of circum- 
stances he drifted into literature, the craft of 
letters seems never to have been his ambition. 
He thinks of turning lawyer, physician, clergy- 
man, — anything but author ; and when at last he 
engages in that profession, it is to free himself 
from a scholastic slavery which he seems to have 
always regarded with peculiar bitterness, yet to 
which, after a first unsatisfactory trial of what 
was to be his true vocation, he unhesitatingly 
returned. If he went back anew to the pen, it 
was only to enable him to escape from it more 
effectually, and he was prepared to go as far as 
Coromandel. But Literature, " toute eniihe a sa 
proie attaMe,'' refused to relinquish him ; and, 



Goldsmith's Poems and Pla/s. ii 

although he continued to make spasmodic efforts 
to extricate himself from the toils, detained him 
to the day of his death. 

If there is no evidence that he had written 
much when he entered upon what has- been 
called his second period, he had not the less 
formed his opinions on many literary questions. 
Much of the matter of the " Polite Learning" 
is plainly manufactured ad hoc; but in its refer- 
ences to authorship and criticism, there is an 
individual note which is absent elsewhere ; and 
when he speaks of the tyranny of publishers, the 
petty standards of criticism, and the forlorn and 
precarious existence of the hapless writer for 
bread, he is evidently reproducing a condition of 
things with which he had become familiar during 
his brief bondage on the ^' Monthly Review." 
As to his personal views on poetry in particular, 
it is easy to collect them from this and later 
utterances. Against blank verse he objects from 
the first, as suited only to the sublimest themes, 
— which is a polite way of shelving it altogether ; 
while in favour of rhyme he alleges — perhaps 
borrowing his illustration from Montaigne — 
that the very restriction stimulates the fancy, as 
a fountain plays highest when the aperture is 
diminished. Blank verse, too (he asserts), im- 
ports into poetry a "disgusting solemnity of 



1 2 Miscellanies. 

manner" which is fatal to "agreeable trifling," 
— an objection intimately connected with the 
feeling which afterwards made him the champion 
on the stage of character and humour. Among 
the poets who were his contemporaries and im- 
mediate predecessors, his likes and dislikes were 
strong. He fretted at the fashion which Gray's 
" Elegy" set in poetry ; he considered it a fine 
poem, but " overloaded with epithet," and he 
deplored the remoteness and want of emotion 
which distinguished the Pindaric Odes. Yet 
from many indications in his own writings he 
seems to have genuinely appreciated the work 
of Collins. Churchill, and ChurchilFs satire, he 
detested. With Young he had some personal 
acquaintance, and had evidently read his " Night 
Thoughts " with attention. Of the poets of the 
last age, he admired Dryden, Pope, and Gay, 
but more than any of these, if imitation is to be 
regarded as the surest proof of sympathy. Prior, 
Addison, and Swift. By his inclinations and his 
training, indeed, he belonged to this school. 
But he was in advance of it in thinking that 
poetry, however didactic after the fashion of his 
own day, should be simple in its utterance and 
directed at the many rather than at the few. 
This is what he meant when, from the critical 
elevation of Griffiths' back parlour, he recom- 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 13 

mended Gray to take the advice of Isocrates, 
and " study the people." If, with these ideas, he 
had been able to divest himself of the '' w^arbling 
groves" and ** finny deeps" of the Popesque 
vocabulary (of much of the more "mechanic 
art " of that supreme artificer he did successfully 
divest himself), it vi^ould have needed but little 
to make him a prominent pioneer of the new 
school which was coming with Cowper. As it 
is, his poetical attitude is a little that intermedi- 
ate one of Longfellow's maiden, — 

" Standing, with reluctant feet, 
Where the brook and river meet." 

Most of his minor and earlier pieces are 
imitative. In "A New Simile," and ''The 
Logicians Refuted" (if that be his) Swift is his 
acknowledged model; in "The Double Trans- 
formation " it is Prior, modified by certain 
theories personal to himself. He was evidently 
well acquainted with collections such as the 
" M^nagiana," and with the French minor poets 
of the eighteenth century, many of which latter 
were among his books at his death. These he 
had carefully studied, probably during his con- 
tinental wanderings, and from them he derives, 
like Prior, something of his grace and metrical 
buoyancy. The " Elegy on the Death of a 



14 Miscellanies. 

Mad Dog," and "Madam Blaize," are both 
more or less constructed on the old French 
popular song of the hero of Pavia, Jacques de 
Chabannes, Seigneur de la Palice (sometimes 
Galisse), with, in the case of the former, a tag 
from an epigram by Voltaire, the original of 
which is in the Greek Anthology, though Vol- 
taire simply "conveyed" his version from an 
anonymous French predecessor. Similarly the 
lively stanzas "To Iris in Bow Street/' the 
lines to Myra, the quatrain called " A South 
American Ode," and that "On a Beautiful 
Youth struck blind with Lightning," are all 
confessed or unconfessed translations. If Gold- 
smith had lived to collect his own works, it is 
possible that he would have announced the 
source of his inspiration in these instances as 
well as in one or two other cases, — the epitaph 
on Ned Purdon, for example, — where it has 
been reserved to his editors to discover his obli- 
gations. On the other hand, he might have 
contended, with perfect justice, that whatever 
the source of his ideas, he had made them his 
own when he got them ; and certainly in lilt 
and lightness, the lines "To Iris" are infinitely 
superior to those of La Monnoye on which they 
are based. But even a fervent admirer may 
admit that, dwelling as he did in this very vitre- 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 15 

ous palace of Gallic adaptation, one does not 
expect to find him throwing stones at Prior 
for borrowing from the French, or commenting 
solemnly in the Life of Parnell upon the heinous- 
ness of plagiarism. '' It was the fashion," he 
says, " with the wits of the last age, to conceal 
the places from whence they took their hints 
or their subjects. A trifling acknowledgment 
would have made that lawful prize which may 
now be considered as plunder." He might judi- 
ciously have added to this latter sentence the 
quotation which he struck out of the second 
issue of the ^'Polite Learning," — "Hand 
inexpertus loquor.'' 

Of his longer pieces, *'The Traveller " was 
apparently suggested to him by Addison's " Let- 
ter from Italy to Lord Halifax," a poem to 
which, in his preliminary notes to the •' Beauties 
of English Poesy," he gives significant praise. 
''There is in it," he says, " a strain of political 
thinking that was, at that time, new in our 
country." He obviously intended that "The 
Traveller" should be admired for the same rea- 
son ; and both in that poem and its successor, 
" The Deserted Village," he lays stress upon the 
political import of his work. The one, we are told, 
is to illustrate the position that the happiness of 
the subject is independent of the goodness of the 



1 6 Miscellanies. 

sovereign ; the other, to deplore the increase of 
luxury, and the miseries of depopulation. But, 
as a crowd of commentators have pointed out, 
it is hazardous for a poet to meddle with " po- 
litical thinking," however much, under George 
the Second, it may have been needful to proclaim 
a serious purpose. If Goldsmith had depended 
solely upon the professedly didactic part of his 
attempt, his work would be as dead as '* Free- 
dom," or "Sympathy," or any other of Dods- 
ley's forgotten quartos. Fortunately he did more 
than this. Sensibly or insensibly, he suffused 
his work with that philanthropy which is "not 
learned by the royal road of tracts and platform 
speeches and monthly magazines," but by per- 
sonal commerce with poverty and sorrow ; and he 
made his appeal to that clinging love of country, 
of old association, of "home-bred happiness," 
of innocent pleasure, which, with Englishmen, 
is never made in vain. Employing the couplet 
'of Pope and Johnson, he has added to his meas- 
ure a suavity that belonged to neither ; but the 
beauty of his humanity and the tender melancholy 
of his wistful retrospect hold us more strongly 
and securely than the studious finish of his style. 
" Vingt fois sur le mitier remette:{ voire ou- 
prage,'' said the arch-critic whose name, ac- 
cording to Keats, the school of Pope displayed 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. ly 

upon their "decrepit standard." Even in ** The 
Traveller" and "The Deserted Village," there are 
indications of over-labour ; but in a poem which 
comes between them — the once famous " Edwin 
and Angelina " — Goldsmith certainly carried out 
Boileau's maxim to the full. The first privately 
printed version differs considerably from that in 
the first edition of the "Vicar;" this again is 
altered in the fourth ; and there are other varia- 
tions in the piece as printed in the " Poems for 
Young Ladies." "As to my ' Hermit,' " said 
the poet complacently, "that poem, Cradock, 
cannot be amended," — and undoubtedly it has 
been skilfully wrought. But it is impossible to 
look upon it now with the unpurged eyes of 
those upon whom the " Reliques of Ancient 
Poetry " had but recently dawned, still less to 
endorse the verdict of Sir John Hawkins that " it 
is one of the finest poems of the lyric kind that 
our language has to boast of." Its over-soft 
prettiness is too much that of the chromo-litho- 
graph, or the Parian bust (the porcelain, not the 
marble), and its " beautiful simplicity " is in parts 
perilously close upon that inanity which Johnson, 
whose sturdy good sense not even friendship 
could silence, declared to be the characteristic 
of much of Percy's collection. It is instructive 
as a study of poetical progress to contrast it 



i8 Miscellanies. 

with a ballad of our own day in the same 
measure, — the ^' Talking Oak " of Tennyson. 

The remaining poems of Goldsmith, excluding 
the " Captivity," and the admittedly occasional 
" Threnodia Augustalis," are not open to the 
charge of fictitious simplicity, or of that hyper- 
elaboration which, in the words of the poet just 
mentioned, makes for the " ripe and rotten." 
The gallery of kit-cats in " Retaliation," and the 
delightful bonhomie of "The Haunch of Veni- 
son," need no commendation. In kindly humour 
and not unkindly satire Goldsmith was at his 
best, and the imperishable portraits of Burke and 
Garrick and Reynolds, and the inimitable dinner 
at which Lord Clare's pasty was not, are as well 
known as any of the stock passages of "The 
Deserted Village" or "The Traveller" though 
they have never been babbled " in extremis vicis " 
by successive generations of schoolboys. It is 
usually said, probably with truth, that in these 
poems and the delightful " Letter to Mrs. Bun- 
bury," Goldsmith's metre was suggested by the 
cantering anapests of the " New Bath Guide," 
and it is to be observed that " Little Comedy's" 
invitation is to the same favourite tune. But it 
is also the fact that a line of the once popular 
lyric of " Ally Croaker," — 

" Too dull for a wit, too grave for a joker, " — 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 19 

has a kind of echo in the — 

" Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit " — 
of Burke's portrait in " Retaliation." What is 
still more remarkable is that Gray's '' Sketch of 
his own Character," the resemblance of which 
to Goldsmith has been pointed out by his editors, 
begins, — 

" Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune." 

Whether Goldsmith was thinking of Anstey or 
" Ally Croaker," it is at least worthy of passing 
notice that an Irish song of no particular literary 
merit should have succeeded in haunting the 
two foremost poets of their day. 

Poetry brought Goldsmith fame, but money 
only indirectly. Those Saturnian days of the 
subscription-edition, when Pope and Gay and 
Prior counted their gains by thousands, were 
over and gone. He had arrived, it has been 
truly said, too late for the Patron, and too early 
for the Public. Of his lighter pieces, the best 
were posthumous ; the rest were either paid for at 
hack prices or not at all. For " The Deserted 
Village " Griffin gave him a hundred guineas, a 
sum so unexampled as to have prompted the 
pleasant legend that he returned it. For "The 
Traveller " the only payment that can be defi- 



20 Miscellanies. 

nitely traced is ;^2i. *' I cannot afford to court 
the draggle-tail muses," he said laughingly to 
Lord Lisburn ; " they would let me starve ; but 
by my other labours I can make shift to eat, and 
drink, and have good clothes." It was in his 
*' other labours " that his poems helped him. The 
booksellers, who would not or could not remun- 
erate him adequately for delayed production and 
minute revision, were willing enough to secure 
the sanction of his name for humbler journey- 
work. If he was ill-paid for "The Traveller," 
he was not ill-paid for the *' Beauties of English 
Poesy " or the '' History of Animated Nature." 

Yet notwithstanding his ready pen, and his 
skill as a compiler, his life was a treadmill. 
" While you are nibbling about elegant phrases, 
I am obliged to write half a volume," he told 
his friend Cradock ; and it was but natural that 
he should desire to escape into walks where 
he might accomplish something "for his own 
hand," by which, at the same time, he might 
exist. Fiction he had already essayed. Nearly 
two years before " The Traveller" appeared, he 
had written a story about the length of " Joseph 
Andrews," for which he had received little more 
than a third of the sum paid by Andrew Millar 
to Fielding for his burlesque of Richardson's 
" Pamela." But obscure circumstances delayed 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 21 

the publication of the " Vicar of Wakefield " for 
four years, and when at last it was issued, its 
first burst of success — a success, as far as can 
be ascertained, productive of no further profit 
to its author — was followed by a long period 
_during which the sales were languid and un- 
certain. There remained the stage, with its two- 
fold allurement of fame and fortune, both payable 
at sight, added to which it was always possible 
that a popular play, in those days when plays 
were bought to read, might find a brisk market 
in pamphlet form. The prospect was a tempting 
one, and it is scarcely. surprising that Goldsmith, 
weary of the '* dry drudgery at the desk's dead 
wood," and conscious of better things within 
him, should engage in that most tantalising of 
all enterprises, the pursuit of dramatic success. 

For acting and actors he had always shown a 
decided partiality.^ Vague stories, based, in all 
probability, upon the references to strolling 

1 This is not inconsistent with the splenetic utterances 
in the letters to Daniel Hodson, first made public in the 
" Great Writers " life of Goldsmith, where he speaks 
of the stage as " an abominable resource which neither 
became a man of honour, nor a man of sense." Those 
letters were written when the production of "The 
Good-Natur'd Man" had supplied him with abundant 
practical evidence of the vexations and difficulties of 
theatrical ambition. 



22 Miscellanies. 

players in his writings, hinted that he himself had 
once worn the comic sock as "Scrub" in 
"The Beaux' Stratagem;" and it is clear that 
soon after he arrived in England, he had com- 
pleted a tragedy, for he read it in manuscript 
to a friend. That he had been besides an acute 
and observant playgoer is plain from his excel- 
lent account in "' The Bee " of Mademoiselle 
Clairon, whom he had seen at Paris, and from 
his sensible notes in the same periodical on 
" gestic lore " as exhibited on the English stage. 
In his " Polite Learning in Europe," he had 
followed up Ralph's ^' Case of Authors by Pro- 
fession," by protesting against the despotism of 
managers, and the unenlightened but economical 
policy of producing only the works of deceased 
playwrights ; and he was equally opposed to the 
growing tendency on the part of the public — a 
tendency dating from Richardson and the French 
comMie larmo/ante — to substitute sham sensi-^ 
bility and superficial refinement for that humour- 
ous delineation of manners which, with all their 
errors of morality and taste, had been the chief 
aim of Congreve and his contemporaries. To 
the fact that what was now known as " genteel 
comedy" had almost wholly supplanted this 
elder and better manner, must be attributed his 
deferred entry upon a field so obviously adapted 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 23 

to his gifts. But when, in 1766, the ''Clandes- 
tine Marriage " of Garrick and Colman, with its 
evergreen -'Lord Ogleby," seemed to herald a 
return to the side of laughter as opposed to that 
of tears, he took heart of grace, and, calling to 
mind something of the old inconsiderate benevo- 
lence which had been the Goldsmith family- 
failing, set about his first comedy, " The Good- 
Natur'd Man." 

Even without experiment, no one could have 
known better than Goldsmith upon what a sea 
of troubles he had embarked. Those obstacles 
which, more than thirty years before, had been 
so graphically described in Fielding's " Pas- 
quin,'' — which Goldsmith himself had indicated 
with equal accuracy in his earliest book, — still 
lay in the way of all dramatic purpose, and he 
was to avoid none of them. When he submitted 
his completed work to Garrick, the all-powerful 
actor, who liked neither piece nor author, blew 
hot and cold so long that Goldsmith at last, in 
despair, transferred it to Colman. But, as if 
fate was inexorable, Colman, after accepting it 
effusively, also grew dilatory, and ultimately 
entered into a tacit league with Garrick not to 
produce it at Covent Garden until his former 
rival had brought out at Drury Lane a comedy 
by Goldsmith's countryman, Hugh Kelly, a sen- 



24 Miscellanies. 

timentalist of the first water. Upon the heels 
of the enthusiastic reception which Garrick's 
administrative tact secured for the superfine en- 
tanglements of " False Delicacy," came limping 
''The Good-Natur'd Man" of Goldsmith, wet- 
blanketed beforehand by a sombre prologue 
from Johnson. No first appearance could have 
been less favourable. Until it was finally saved 
in the fourth act by the excellent art of Shuter 
as '' Croaker," its fate hung trembling in the 
balance, and even then one of its scenes — not 
afterwards reckoned the worst — had to be with- 
drawn in deference to the delicate scruples of an 
audience which could not suffer such inferior 
beings as bailiffs to come between the wind and 
its gentility. Yet, in spite of all these disad- 
vantages, "The Good-Natur'd Man" obtained 
a hearing, besides bringing its author about five 
hundred pounds, a sum far larger than anything 
he had ever made by poetry or fiction. 

That the superior success of " False Deli- 
cacy," with its mincing morality and jumble of 
inadequate motives, was wholly temporary and 
accidental is evident from the fact that, to use a 
felicitous phrase, it has now to be disinterred in 
order to be discussed. But, notwithstanding 
one's instinctive sympathy for Goldsmith in his 
struggles with the managers, it is not equally 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 2^ 

clear that everything considered, '^The Good- 
Natur'd Man " was unfairly treated by the pub- 
lic. Because Kelly's play was praised too much, 
it by no means follows that Goldsmith's play was 
praised too little. With all the advantage of its 
author's reputation, it has never since passed 
into the rdpertoire, and, if it had something of 
the freshness of a first effort, it had also its in- 
experience. The chief character, Honeywood, 
— the weak and amiable '' good-natur'd man," — 
never stands very firmly on his feet, and the first 
actor of the part, Garrick's promising young 
rival, Powell, failed, or disdained to make it a 
stage success. On the other hand, " Croaker,'*' 
an admitted elaboration of Johnson's sketch of 
*' Suspirius " in the Rambler j is a first-rate comic 
creation, and the charlatan " Lofty," a sort of 
" Beau-Tibbs-above-Stairs," is almost as good. 
But, as Garrick's keen eye saw, to have a sec- 
ond male figure of greater importance than the 
central personage was a serious error of judg- 
ment, added to which neither " Miss Richland " 
nor " Mrs. Croaker " ever establishes any hold 
upon the audience. Last of all, the plot, such 
as it is, cannot be described as either particularly 
ingenious or particularly novel. In another 
way the merit of the piece is, however, incon- 
testable. It is written with all the perspicuous 



26 Miscellanies. 

grace of Goldsmith's easy pen, and, in the 
absence of stage-craft, sparkles with neat and 
effective epigrams. One of these may be men- 
tioned as illustrating the writer's curious (per- 
haps unconscious) habit of repeating ideas which 
had pleased him. He had quoted in his ^' Polite 
Learning" the exquisitely rhythmical close of 
Sir William Temple's prose essay on '* Poetry," 
and in "The Bee" it still seems to haunt him. 
In " The Good-Natur'd Man" he has absorbed 
it altogether, for he places it, without inverted 
commas, in the lips of Croaker,^ 

But if its lack of constructive power and its 
errors of conception make it impossible to re- 
gard " The Good-Natur'd Man " as a substantial 
gain to humourous drama, it was undoubtedly a 
formidable attack upon that "mawkish drab of 
spurious breed," Sentimental Comedy, and its 
success was amply sufficient to justify a second 
trial. That Goldsmith did not forthwith make 
this renewed effort must be attributed partly to 
the recollection of his difficulties in getting his 
first play produced, partly to the fact that, his dra- 
matic gains exhausted, he was almost immediately 
involved in a sequence of laborious taskwork. 

1 In the same way he annexes, both in " The Hermit " 
and " The Citizen of the World," a quotation from 
Young. 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 27 

Still, he had never abandoned his ambition to re- 
store humour and character to the stage ; and as 
time went on, the sense of his past discourage- 
ments grew fainter, while the success of " The 
Deserted Village " increased his importance as 
an author. Sentimentalism, in the meantime, 
had still a majority. Kelly, it is true, was now 
no longer to be feared. His sudden good for- 
tune had swept him into the ranks of the party- 
writers, with the result that the damning of his 
next play, '^A Word to the Wise," had been 
exaggerated into a political necessity. But the 
school which he represented had been recruited 
by a much abler man, Richard Cumberland, and 
it was probably the favourable reception of 
Cumberland's "West Indian" that stimulated 
Goldsmith into striking one more blow for legiti- 
mate comedy. At all events, in the autumn of 
the year in which *' The West Indian " was pro- 
duced, he is hard at work in the lanes at Hen- 
don and Edgware, *' studying jests with a most 
tragical countenance" for a successor to ''The 
Good-Natur'd Man." 

To the modern spectator of " She Stoops to 
Conquer," with its unflagging humour and bus- 
tling action, it must seem almost inconceivable 
that its stage qualities can ever have been ques- 
tioned. Yet questioned they undoubtedly were. 



28 Miscellanies. 

and Goldsmith was spared none of his former 
humiliations. Even from the outset, all was 
against him. His difference with Garrick had 
long been adjusted, and the Drury Lane mana- 
ger would now probably have accepted a new 
play from his pen, especially as that astute ob- 
server had already detected signs of a reaction 
in the public taste. But Goldsmith was morally 
bound to Colman and Covent Garden ; and 
Colman, in whose hands he placed his manu- 
script, proved even more disheartening and un- 
manageable than Garrick had been in the past. 
Before he had come to his decision, the close of 
1772 had arrived. Early in the following year, 
under the irritation of suspense and suggested 
amendments combined, Goldsmith hastily trans- 
ferred his proposal to Garrick ; but, by John- 
son's advice, as hastily withdrew it. Only by 
the express interposition of Johnson was Col- 
man at last induced to make a distinct promise 
to bring out the play at a specific date. To be- 
lieve in it, he could not be persuaded, and his 
contagious anticipations of its failure passed in- 
sensibly to the actors, who, one after another, 
shuffled out of their parts. Even over the epi- 
logue there were vexatious disputes, and when 
at last, in March, 1773, '' She Stoops to Con- 
quer" was performed, its leading actor had pre- 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 29 

viously held no more exalted position than that 
of ground-harlequin, while one of its most promi- 
nent characters had simply been a post-boy in 
''The Good-Natur'd Man." But once fairly 
upon the boards neither lukewarm actors nor an 
adverse manager had any further influence over 
it, and the doubts of every one vanished in the 
uninterrupted applause of the audience. When, 
a few days later, it was printed with a brief and 
grateful dedication to its best friend, Johnson, 
the world already knew with certainty that a 
fresh masterpiece had been added to the roll of 
English Dramatic Literature, and that " genteel 
comedy " had received a decisive blow. 

The effect of this blow, it must be admitted, 
had been aided not a little by the appearance, 
only a week or two earlier, of Footers clever 
puppet-show of "The Handsome Housemaid; 
or. Piety in Pattens," which was openly di- 
rected at Kelly and his following. But ridicule 
by itself, without some sample of a worthier 
substitute, could not have sufficed to displace a 
persistent fashion. This timely antidote " She 
Stoops to Conquer," in the most unmistakable 
way, afforded. From end to end of the piece 
there is not a sickly or a maudlin word. Even 
Sheridan, writing '' The Rivals " two years later, 
thought it politic to insert " Faulkland " and 



30 Miscellanies. 

^' Julia" for the benefit of the sentimentalists. 
Goldsmith made no such concession, and his 
wholesome, hearty merriment put to flight the 
Comedy of Tears, — even as the Coquecigrues 
vanished before the large-lunged laugh of Pan- 
tagruel. If, as Johnson feared, the plot bor- 
dered slightly upon farce — and of what good 
comedy may this not be said? — at least it can 
be urged that its most farcical incident, the mis- 
taking of a gentleman's house for an inn, had 
really happened, since it had happened to the 
writer himself. But the superfine objections of 
Walpole and his friends are now ancient history, 
■ — history so ancient that it is scarcely credited, 
while Goldsmith's manly assertion (after Field- 
ing) of the author's right " to stoop among the 
low to copy nature," has been ratified by suc- 
cessive generations of novelists and playwrights. 
What is beyond dispute is the healthy atmo- 
sphere, the skilful setting, the lasting freshness 
and fidelity to human nature of the persons of 
his drama. Not content with the finished por- 
traits of the Hardcastles (a Vicar and Mrs. 
Primrose promoted to the squirearchy), — not 
content with the incomparable and unapproach- 
able Tony, the author has managed to make 
attractive what is too often insipid, his heroines 
and their lovers. Miss Hardcastle and Miss 



Goldsmith's Poems and Plays. 31 

Neville are not only charming young women, 
but charming characters, while Marlow and 
Hastings are much more than stage young men. 
And let it be remembered — it cannot be too 
often remembered — that in returning to those 
Farquhars and Vanbrughs " of the last age," 
who differed so widely from the Kellys and 
Cumberlands of his own, Goldsmith has brought 
back no taint of their baser part. Depending 
solely for its avowed intention to '* make an 
audience merry," upon the simple development 
of its humourous incident, his play (wonderful 
to relate 1) attains its end without resorting to 
impure suggestion or equivocal intrigue. In- 
deed, there is but one married woman in the 
piece, and she traverses it without a stain upon 
her character. 

" She Stoops to Conquer" is Goldsmith's last 
dramatic work, for the trifling sketch of "The 
Grumbler" had never more than a grateful pur- 
pose. When, only a year later, the little funeral 
procession from 2, Brick Court laid him in his 
unknown grave in the Temple burying-ground, 
the new comedy of which he had written so 
hopefully to Garrick was still non-existent. 
Would it have been better than its last fortunate 
predecessor? — would those early reserves of 
memory and experience have still proved in- 



32 Miscellanies. 

exhaustible > The question cannot be answered. 
Through debt, and drudgery, and depression, 
the writer's genius had still advanced, and these 
might yet have proved powerless to check his 
progress. But at least it was given to him to 
end upon his best, and not to outlive it. For, 
in that critical sense which estimates the value 
of a work by its excellence at all points/it can 
scarcely be contested that "She Stoops to 
Conquer" is his best production. In spite of 
their beauty and humanity, the lasting quality of 
" The Traveller " and " The Deserted Village " 
is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude 
between the poetry of convention and the 
poetry of nature — between the gradus epithet of 
Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth. 
With the " Vicar of Wakefield " again, immortal 
though it be, it is less his art that holds us than 
his charm, his humour, and his tenderness, which 
tempt us to forget his inconsistency and his 
errors of haste. In " She Stoops to Conquer," 
neither defect of art nor defect of nature forbids 
us to give unqualified admiration to a work 
which lapse of time has shown to be still 
unrivalled in its kind. 



ANGELO'S ** REMINISCENCES." 

TN the year 175 — (it is not possible to fix the 
-■■ date more precisely), there was what would 
now be called a public assault of arms at one 
of the great hotels of pre-revolutionary Paris. 
Among the amateurs who took part in it — for 
there were amateurs as well as professionals — 
was a foreign proUgi of the Duke de Niver- 
nais, that amiable and courteous nobleman who 
subsequently visited this country at the close 
of the Seven Years' War, in the character of 
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary 
from His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV. 
The stranger, who was in the prime of life, 
was of graceful figure and address, and his 
name had been no sooner announced than an 
English lady, then visiting the French capital, 
and possessed of great vivacity and considerable 
personal attractions, stepped forward and pre- 
sented him with a bunch of roses. He received 
it with becoming gallantry, fastened it carefully 
on his left breast, and forthwith declared that 
he would defend it against all comers. What 
3 



34 Miscellanies. 

is more, he kept his promise. He afterwards 
" fenced with several of the first masters, not 
one of whom," says the narrator of the story, 
*' could disturb a single leaf of the bouquet.'' 
The lady was the celebrated Mrs. Margaret 
Woffington, then in the height of her fame as 
a beauty and an actress ; the gentleman was an 
Italian, travelling for his pleasure. He was the 
son of a well-to-do merchant at Leghorn, and 
and he was called Dominico Angelo Malevolti 
Tremamondo. 

Shortly after the foregoing incident, Signor 
Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo (''I 
love" — says Goldsmith of Miss Carolina Wil- 
elmina Amelia Skeggs — "to give the whole 
name I " ) transported his foil and his good looks 
to this country. In addition to his proficiency 
as a fencer, he was '^ a master of equitation," 
having been a pupil of the then famous scientific 
horseman, Teillagory^ the elder. These were 
accomplishments which speedily procured for 
him both popularity and patrons in London. He 
became in a few months dcuyer to Henry Her- 
bert, tenth Earl of Pembroke, who was not only 
an accomplished cavalier himself, but was then, 
or was soon to be, lieutenant-colonel of Elliot's 
Light Horse, a crack dragoon regiment, which, 

1 Here and elsewhere we correct Angelo's spelling. 



Angela's *^ Reminiscences." 35 

by the way, numbered among its corporals the 
future Astley of the Westminster Bridge Road 
Amphitheatre. Lord Pembroke had private 
manages both in the neighbourhood of his house 
in Whitehall Gardens (part of the present No. 
7), and at his family seat of Wilton, near Salis- 
bury. At first his 6cuyer confined himself to 
teaching riding ; but a chance encounter at the 
Thatched House Tavern with Dr. Keys, a well- 
known Irish fencer, in which he vanquished his 
antagonist, determined his choice of the calling of 
a maitre d'armes. His first pupil was the Duke 
of Devonshire. Later he was engaged by the 
Princess of Wales to instruct the young princes 
in horsemanship and the use of the small sword, 
for which purposes premises were provided 
in Leicester Fields, within two doors from 
Hogarth's dwelling in the east corner. Before 
many years were over, Dominico Angelo — for 
he seems to have discarded first one and then 
the other of his last two names — set up a riding 
school of his own in Soho. But previously to 
all this, and apparently not long after his arrival 
in London, he had fallen in love with, and taken 
to wife, the daughter of an English naval officer. 
Judging from the picture of her which Rey- 
nolds painted in 1766, the bride (who was a 
minor) must have been as handsome as her 



36 Miscellanies. 

husband. The marriage took place in February, 

1755, at St. George's, Hanover Square, the 
register of which duly records the union, by 
license of the Archbishop of Canterbury, of 
Domenico Angelo Malevolti, bachelor, and 
Elizabeth Johnson, spinster. The pair had a 
son, the Henry Angelo from whose disorgan- 
ised and gossiping " Reminiscences '' ^ most of 
the foregoing particulars are derived. 

Harry Angelo, so he was called, is not explicit 
as to the date of his birth, which probably took 
place at the end of 1755 or the beginning of 

1756. It seems at first to have been intended 
that he should enter the Navy ; and, as a matter 
of fact, he was actually enrolled by Captain 
Augustus Hervey (Lady Hervey's second son) 
on the books of the Dragon man-of war in the 
capacity of midshipman, thereby becoming en- 
titled, at an extremely tender age, to some 
twenty-five guineas prize money. After a short 
period under Dr. Rose of Chiswick, the transla- 
tor of Sallust, he went to Eton, where his father 
taught fencing ; and at Eton he remained for 
some years. Two of his school-fellows were 
Nathan and Carrington Garrick, the actor's 

1 " Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, with Memoirs of 
his late Father and Friends," 2 vols., London : Colburn 
and Bentley, 1830. 



Angelo's ^* Reminiscences.'" }j 

nephews ; and young Angelo had pleasant mem- 
ories of their uncle's visits to Eton, where, be- 
ing a friend of the elder Angelo, he would regale 
all three boys sumptuously at the Christopher 
inn, and amuse them with quips and recitations.^ 
Harry Angelo had even the good fortune, while 
at Eton, to be taken to that solemn tom- 
foolery, the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, in which 
his father doubled the part of Mark Antony 
with that of director of fireworks. Another 
occasional visitor to the school, magnificently 
frogged and braided after the fashion of his 
kind, was the Italian quack Dominicetti, also a 
family friend, who treated the boys royally. 
But perhaps the most interesting memories of 
young Angelo's Eton days are those which 
recall a holiday spent at Amesbury with his 
father and mother, as the guest of the Duke 
and Duchess of Queensberry. In his old age 
he could clearly picture the tall, thin figure of 
the taciturn Duke, in high leather gaiters, 
short-skirted frock, and gold-laced hat ; and he 

1 Apparently Garrick often did this. Once, at Hamp- 
ton, he read Chaucer's '* Cock and Fox " to the boys after 
supper, and then, having recited Goldsmith's " Hermit," 
fell asleep in his arm-chair. Thereupon Mrs. Garrick, 
taking off her lace apron, fondly placed it over his face, 
and motioned her young friends away to bed. 



38 Miscellanies, 

well remembered the Duchess, then nearly 
eighty, but still energetic and garrulous, in a 
Quaker-coloured silk and black hood. He also 
remembered that he was allowed (like Gay 
before him) to fish for carp in the Amesbury 
water. 

When he was entering his seventeenth year, 
Harry Angeio was sent to Paris to learn French. 
He was placed en pension in the Rue Poupe 
with a M. Boileau, a half-starved maitre de 
langue, who, since he is seriously likened by his 
pupil to the Apothecary in " Romeo and Juliet." 
must really have resembled the typical French- 
man as depicted by Smollett and Rowlandson. 
Boileau was a conscientious teacher, but a mis- 
erable caterer; and young Angeio, after nar- 
rowly escaping collapse from starvation and close 
confinement, was eventually removed from his 
care. He passed, in the first instance, to a M. 
Liviez, whose wife was English, and (notwith- 
standing an undeniable squint) of a shape suffi- 
cently elegant to have served as the model for 
Roubillac's figure of Eloquence on the Argyll 
tomb at Westminster Abbey. M. Liviez had 
been a dancer, and ballet-master at a London 
theatre. At this date he was a hon vivant, who 
collected prints. He was also subject to fits of 
hypochondria (probably caused by over-eating), 



Angeld's ^^ Reminiscences,^'' 39 

when he would imagine himself Apollo, and 
fiddle feverishly to the nine Muses^ typified for 
the nonce by a hemicycle of chairs. As both he 
and his wife preferred to speak English, they 
made no pretence to teach their lodger French ; 
but, from the point of commissariat, the change 
from the Rue Poup6 to the Rue Battois was 
*' removal from Purgatory to Paradise." While 
Angelo was in Paris, Garrick sent him an intro- 
duction to Preville, whom Sterne describes as 
*' Mercury himself," and who was, indeed, in 
some respects Garrick's rival. Pr^ville knew 
Foote ; and when Foote came to the French 
capital, he invited Angelo to a supper, at which 
Preville was present. Foote, binding Angelo 
to secrecy, delighted the company by mimick- 
ing their common acquaintance, the great Ros- 
cius ; and Preville in his turn imitated the leading 
French comedians. All this was not very fa- 
vourable to proficiency in the French language, 
which Angelo would probably have learned 
better in M. Boileau's garret. On the other 
hand, under Motet, then the champion pareur 
of the Continent, he became an expert swords- 
man — able, and only too willing, to take part 
in the encounters which, in the Paris of the day, 
were as common as street rows in London. 
But apart from swallowing the button and some 



40 Miscellanies. 

inches of a foil when fencing with Lord Masse- 
reene in the Prison of the Abbaye (where that 
nobleman was unhappily in durance for debt), 
he seems to have enjoyed an exceptional immun- 
ity from accidents of all kinds. 

He returned to London in 1775. ^^^ home 
at this time was at Carlisle House, ^ in King's 
Square Court (now Carlisle Street), Soho. It 
was a spacious old Caroline mansion of red 
brick, which had belonged to the Howard family, 
and had been bought by Dominico Angelo from 
Lord Delaval, brother of Foote's patron, the 
Sir Francis to whom he dedicated his comedy 
of " Taste." There were lofty rooms with en- 
riched ceilings ; there was a marble-floored hall ; 
there was a grand decorated staircase painted by 
Salvator's pupil, Henry Cook. In this building, 
at the beginning of 1763, its new owner had 
opened his fencing school, and subsequently, in 
the garden at the back, had erected stables and 
a mandge, which extended to Wardour Street. 
Between pupils, resident and otherwise, and 
troops of friends, Carlisle House must always 

1 Not to be confounded with Carlisle House on the 
other side of Soho Square, which was occupied from 1760 
to 1778 b}- the enterprising Mrs. Teresa Cornelys, whose 
ballroom was in Sutton Street, on the site of the present 
Roman Catholic Church of St. Patrick. 



Angela's ^^Reminiscences,'' 41 

have been well filled and animated. Garrick, 
who was accustomed to consult the elder Angelo 
on matters of costume and stage machinery, was 
often a visitor, and presented his adviser with a 
magnificent silver goblet (long preserved by the 
Angelos as an heirloom), which held three bottles 
of Burgundy. Richard Brinsley Sheridan and 
his father were also friends, and it was from 
Dominico Angelo that the younger man, as a 
boy at Harrow, acquired that use of the small 
sword which was to stand him in such good 
stead in his later duel with Captain Mathews. 
Wilkes, again, resplendent in his favourite scar- 
let and gold, not seldom looked in on his way 
from his Westminster or Kensington houses ; 
and Foote, the Chevalier D'Eon, and General 
Paoli were constant guests. Home Tooke, 
who lived hard by in Dean Street, was another 
intimate ; and, when he was not discussing con- 
temporary politics with Wilkes and Tom Sheri- 
dan, would sometimes enliven the company by 
singing a parody on ' ' God save the King," which 
v/as not entirely to the loyal taste of the elder 
Angelo. Bach of the harpsichord,^ with Abel of 

1 This was John Christian Bach, Bach's son, familiarly 
known as " English Bach." Angelo calls him Sebastian, 
but John Sebastian Bach died in 1750. Bach and Abel 
jointly conducted Mrs. Cornelys' concerts. 



42 Miscellanies. 

the viol-da- gamb a, were next-door neighbours 
and free of the house ; Bartolozzi the engraver, 
and his inseparable Cipriani, were on an almost 
equally favoured footing. Another hahitui was 
Gainsborough, whose passion for music is his- 
torical, and from whom any one could extract a 
sketch in return for a song or a tune. The walls 
of Abel's room were covered by drawings ac- 
quired in this manner, and pinned loosely to 
the paper-hangings, — drawings which afterwards 
fetched their price at Langford's in the Piazza. 
Besides these, came Philip de Loutherbourg, 
whom Dominico Angelo had introduced to Gar- 
rick as scene painter for Drury Lane ; and 
Canaletto, whom he had known at Venice ; and 
Zoffany ; and George Stubbs, the author of the 
" Anatomy of the Horse," who carried on his 
studies in the Carlisle House Riding School, no 
doubt taking for model, among others, that 
famous white charger Monarch, of which the 
presentment survives to posterity, under King 
William HI. of immortal memory, in West's 
"■ Battle of the Boyne." ^ " All the celebrated 
horse painters of the last, and some of the vet- 
erans of the present age," says the author of the 

1 The " Battle of the Boyne " was engraved by John 
Hall, Raimbach's master. See post, " An English En- 
graver in Paris." 



Angela's ''Reminiscences,^^ 43 

''Reminiscences," "were constant visitors at 
our table or at tlie manige^ Lastly, an enthusi- 
astic, though scarcely artistic, amateur of the 
Carlisle Street stud was the corpulent " Hero 
of Culloden," — otherwise " Billy the Butcher." 
If not the greatest, he was certainly the heaviest 
prince in Christendom, since he rode some four- 
and-twenty stone, and, as a boy, Harry Angelo 
well remembered the significant sidelong dip of 
the carriage when His Royal Highness poised 
his ponderous body on the step. 

An establishment upon the scale and tradi- 
tions of Carlisle House (and there was also a 
"cake-house " or country-box at Acton, for which 
Zoffany painted decorations) could only have 
been maintained at considerable expense. But 
in this respect Dominico Angelo seems to have 
been unusually fortunate, even for a foreigner. 
Within a short period after his arrival in England 
his income, according to his son, was over two 
thousand a year ; and this sum, in the height 
of his prosperity, was nearly doubled. After 
Harry Angelo's account of his life in Paris, his 
records, always disconnected, grow looser in 
chronology ; added to which, it is never quite 
easy to distinguish his personal recollections 
from the mere floating hearsay of a retentive 
but capricious memory. One of his earliest 



44 Miscellanies. 

experiences, however, on returning to England, 
must have been his attendance, in December, 
177^, at the trial, in the Old Bailey, of Mrs. 
Margaret Caroline Rudd, for complicity in the 
forgery for which the Brothers Perreau were 
subsequently hanged.^ His description of this 
fair-haired siren suggests a humbler Becky Sharp 
or Valerie Marneffe, and there can be little 
doubt that, as he implies, she owed her unde- 
served acquittal to the '* irresistible power of 
fascination" which captivated Boswell, and inter- 
ested even his ''illustrious Friend." Another 
incident at which Angelo assisted shortly after- 
wards, and which it is also possible to place 
precisely, was the riot that, in February, 1776, 
accompanied the attempt to produce at Drury 
Lane Parson Bate's unpopular opera of " The 
Blackamoor washed White." Angelo was one 
of a boxful of the author's supporters, who were 
forced to retire under the furious cannonade of 
"apples, oranges, and other such missiles," to 
which they were exposed. But a still more 
important theatrical event was his presence on 

1 One wonders whether Thackeray was thinking of 
this catise ceUbre in " Denis Duval," where there is a Miss 
Rudge and a Farmer Perreaic. Angelo, it may be added, 
was present at the hanging at Tyburn of M. de la Motte;, 
an actual character in the same book. 



Angela's "■ Reminiscences.'' 45 

that historic June lo, 1776, when Garrick bade 
farewell to the stage. He and his mother were 
in Mrs. Garrick's box, and the two ladies con- 
tinued sobbing so long after they had quitted 
the house as to prompt the ironic comment 
of the elder Angelo that they could not have 
grieved more at the great man's funeral itself. 
Harry Angelo was also a spectator of the prog- 
ress to Tyburn, in the following February, of 
the unfortunate Dr. Dodd;, to whom, and to the 
horrors of " Execution Day" in general, he de- 
votes some of the latter pages of his first volume. 
" His [Dodd's] corpse-like appearance produced 
an awful picture of human woe. Tens of thou- 
sands of hats, which formed a black mass, as 
the coach advanced were taken off simultane- 
ously, and so many tragic faces exhibited a 
spectacle the effect of which is beyond the 
power of words to describe. Thus the proces- 
sion travelled onwards through the multitude, 
whose silence added to the awfulness of the 
scene." Two years later Angelo witnessed the 
execution of another clergyman, James Hack- 
man, who was hanged for shooting Lord Sand- 
wich's mistress. Miss Martha Reay. The 
murder — it will be remembered — took place 
in the Piazza at Covent Garden, as the lady was 
leaving the theatre, and Angelo, according to his 



46 Miscellanies. 

own account, had only quitted it himself a few 
minutes before. He afterwards saw the body 
of the hapless criminal under dissection at Sur- 
geons' Hall, — a gruesome testimony to the 
truth of Hogarth's final plate in the " Four 
Stages of Cruelty." 

The above, the Gordon riots of '80, and the 
burning in '92 of Wyatt's Pantheon, are some 
of the few things in Angelo's first volume which 
it is practicable to date with certainty. The 
second volume is scarcely more than a sequence 
of headed paragraphs, roughly parcelled into sec- 
tions, and difficult to sample. Like his father 
(who died at Eton in 1802), he became a '* mas- 
ter of the sword," and like him, again, he lived 
upon terms of quasi-familiarity with many titled 
practitioners of that art, — being, indeed, upon 
one occasion the guest of the Duke of Sussex 
at the extremely select Neapolitan Club, an 
honour which — as the Prince of Wales was 
also present — seems to have been afterwards 
regarded as too good to be believed. Like 
Dominico Angelo, also, he had an extensive ac- 
quaintance with the artists and actors of his day. 
He had himself learned drawing at Eton under 
the Prince's master, Alexander Cozens, the 
apostle of " blottesque," and had studied a little 
with Bartolozzi and Cipriani. He had even 



Angela's ^^Reminiscences.'" 47 

ventured upon a few caricatures, in particular 
one of Lady Queensberry's black protdgd, Sou- 
bise ; and he was intimate with Thomas Rowland- 
son, whom he had known from boyhood, and 
followed to his grave in April, 1827. When 
Rowlandson was on his continental travels, An- 
gela was living in Paris, and he possessed many 
of the drawings which his friend executed at 
this time. In London they were frequently 
companions at Vauxhall and other places of 
amusement, where Rowlandson's busy pencil 
found its field of activity ; and together they 
often heard the chimes at midnight in the house 
at Beaufort Buildings inhabited by Rowland- 
son's fat Maecenas, the banker Mitchel, one of 
whose favourite guests was Peter Pindar. An- 
gelo gives a good many anecdotes which have 
been utilised by Rowlandson's biographers ; but 
perhaps the least hackneyed record of their 
alliance is contained in the pages which describe 
their joint visit to Portsmouth to see the French 
prizes after Lord Howe's victory of the ist 
June, 1794. Angelo got down first, and went 
on board the largest French vessel, the Sans 
Pareil (80 guns). He gives a graphic account of 
the appalling devastation, — the decks ploughed 
up by the round shot, the masts gone by the 
board, the miserable boyish crew, the hogshead 



48 Miscellanies. 

of spirits to keep up their courage in action, the 
jumble of dead and dying in the 'tween decks, 
and above all, the terrible, sickening stench. 
On Howe's vessel, the Queen Charlotte, on the 
contrary, there was scarcely a trace of battle, 
though another ship, the Brunswick, had suffered 
to a considerable extent. Rowlandson joined 
Angelo at Portsmouth, and they witnessed to- 
gether the landing of the prisoners. Afterwards 
they visited Forton, where, upon leaving one of 
the sick wards, Rowlandson made a ghastly 
study of a dying ^' Mounseer" sitting up in bed 
to write his will, a priest with a crucifix at his 
side. By this time Angelo had had enough of 
the horrors of war, and he returned to town, 
leaving Rowlandson to go on to Southampton to 
make — so he says — sketches of Lord Moira's 
embarkation for La Vendee. Here, however, 
the writer's recollection must have failed him, 
for Lord Moira's fruitless expedition was nearly 
a year old. What Rowlandson no doubt saw 
was his Lordship's departure for Ostend to join 
the Duke of York. Angelo speaks highly of 
the — for Rowlandson — unusual finish and spirit 
of these drawings, with their boatloads of 
soldiers and studies of shipping. They were 
purchased by Fores of Piccadilly, but do not 
appear to have been reproduced. There is, 



Angela's ^' Reminiscences.'' 49 

however, at South Kensington a sketch by 
Rowlandson of the French prizes coming into 
Portsmouth, which must have been made at 
this date. 

Another associate of Angelo, and also of 
Rowlandson, was John (or more familiarly, 
Jack) Bannister, the actor. Bannister and 
Rowlandson had been students together at the 
Royal Academy, and had combined in wor- 
rying, by mimicry and caricature, gruff Richard 
Wilson, who had succeeded Frank Hayman 
as librarian. In the subsequent pranks of this 
practical joking age, Angelo, who had known 
them both from boyhood, often made a third ; 
and he was present upon an occasion which was 
as unfeignedly pathetic as Garrick's famous fare- 
well, — the farewell of Bannister to the stage. 
Many of the anecdotes contained in the enter- 
tainment which preceded this leave-taking — 
namely, " Bannister's Budget," — were included 
by permission in the " Reminiscences ; " and 
Angelo, who had learned elocution from Tom 
Sheridan, and was an excellent amateur actor, 
more than once played for Bannister's benefits, 
notably at the Italian Opera House in 1792 as 
Mrs. Cole in Foote's '' Minor," and in 1800 
before the Royal Family at Windsor as Papillon 
in "The Liar," also by Foote. On this latter 
4 



50 Miscellanies. 

occasion the bill records that Mr. H. Angelo, 
" by particular desire," obliged vAth. " A Solo 
Duet ; or, Ballad Singers in Cranbourn Alley." 
These were by no means his only dramatic essays. 
At the pretty little private theatre which, in 
1788, that emphatically lively nobleman, Rich- 
ard, seventh Earl of Barrymore, erected at War- 
grave-on-Thames, he was a frequent performer. 
His first, or one of his first parts, was that 
of Dick in Vanbrugh's " Confederacy," when 
Barrymore played Brass ; and a later and 
favourite impersonation was Worsdale's rdle of 
Lady Pentweazel in Foote's " Taste." Angelo is 
careful, however, to explain that the exigencies 
of his professional engagements did not permit 
him to go to the full length of the Wargrave Court 
of Comus — some of whose revels must have 
closely resembled that '' blind hookey " by which 
the footman in "The Newcomes" described 
the doings of Lord Farintosh. As he seems, 
nevertheless, to have accompanied Barrymore 
to low spouting clubs like Jacob's Well ; to have 
driven with him at night through the long strag- 
gling street of Colnbrook, while his sportive 
Lordship was industriously " fanning the day- 
lights/' i.e. breaking the windows to right and 
left with his whip ; and to have serenaded Mrs. 
Fitzherbert in his company at Brighton, — he 



Angelo's ^' Reminiscences.'' 51 

had certainly sufficient opportunities for studying 
the "caprices and eccentricities" of this illus- 
trious and erratic specimen of what the late 
Mortimer Collins was wont to describe as the 
" strong generation." Besides acting at War- 
grave, he had also often joined in the private 
theatricals at Brandenburgh House, then the 
Hammersmith home of Lord Berkeley's sister, 
that Margravine of Anspach whose comedy of 
' ' The Sleep- Walker " Walpole had printed at the 
Strawberry Hill Press, Lastly, he was a mem- 
ber of the short-lived Pic-Nic Society inaugu- 
rated by Lady Buckinghamshire, an association 
which combined balls and private plays with 
suppers on the principle of the line in Gold- 
smith's " Retaliation", — 

" Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united." 

Lady Buckinghamshire, a large personage, with 
a good digestion and an unlimited appetite for 
pleasure, was one of the three card-loving leaders 
of fashion satirised so mercilessly by Gillray 
as "Faro's Daughters," — her fellow-sinners 
being Lady Archer and Mrs. Concannon. But 
whatever may have happened over the green 
tables at St. James's Square, " gaming" — says 
Angelo — "formed no part of the plan of the 
Pic-Nics." Not the less, they had their ele- 



-52 Miscellanies. 

ment of chance. It was the practice to draw 
lots for furnishing the supper, an arrangement 
which, if it sometimes permitted the drawers 
t© escape with a pound cake or a bag of China 
oranges, as often imposed upon them the en- 
forced provision of a dozen of champagne or a 
three-guinea Perigord pie. 

It would take a lengthy article to exhaust the 
budget of these chaotic memories, even if one 
made rigid selection of those incidents only in 
which the writer affirms that he was personally 
concerned. Not a few of the stories, however, 
are common property, and are told as well else- 
where. For instance, Angelo repeats the anec- 
dote of Goldsmith's '' Croaker," Shuter, who, 
following — for his " Cries of London" — a par- 
ticularly musical vendor of silver eels, found to 
his vexation that on this particular occasion the 
man was unaccountably mute. Questioning him 
at length, the poor fellow explained, with a burst 
of tears, that his vife had died that day, and that 
he could not cry. This is related in Taylor's 
" Records," and no doubt in a dozen places 
besides. Similarly, the anecdote of Hayman 
the painter, and the Marquis of Granby, both 
gouty, having a bout with the gloves previous 
to a sitting, is to be found in the " Somerset 
House Gazette " of *^' Ephraim Hardcastie " 



Angela's ^'Reminiscences.'' 55 

(W. H. Pyne) ; and it has been suggested, we 
know not upon what authority, that Pyne had a 
good deal to do with Angelo's chronicles. Be 
this as it may, there are plenty of anecdotes 
which are so obviously connected with the nar- 
rator that, even if all the make-weights be dis- 
carded, a residue remains which is far too large 
to be dealt with here. We shall confine our- 
selves to the few pages which refer to Byron, 
whom Angelo seems to have known well. 
Byron, who had been one of Angelo's pupils at 
Harrow, had interested himself in establishing 
Angelo as a fencing master at Cambridge, where 
he entertained him and Theodore Hook at din- 
ner, seeing them off himself afterwards by the 
London stage, duly fortified with stirrup cups 
of the famous St. John's College beer. When 
later Byron left Cambridge for town, Angelo 
seems to have taken great pains to find a book 
which his noble friend wanted in order to decide 
a wager, and his eventual success increased the 
favour in which he stood. He was subse- 
quently in the habit of giving Byron lessons at 
the Albany in the broadsword, — a fearsome 
exercise which was chosen in view of the pupil's 
tendency to flesh, and for which he elaborately 
handicapped himself with furs and flannels. Of 
these relations between Angelo and Byron at 



54 Miscellanies. 

this date a memento is still said to survive at 
Mr. John Murray's in Albemarle Street. It is 
a screen made by Angelo for his patron. On 
one side are all the eminent pugilists from 
Broughton to Jackson ; on the other the great 
actors from Betterton to Kean. When Byron 
left the country in 1816 the screen was sold 
with his effects, and so passed into the pious 
hands of its present possessor. 

Reference has already been made to what Mr. 
Egerton Castle accurately describes as Angelo's 
*' graceful ease " in eluding dates, and it should 
be added that he gives very few particulars re- 
specting his personal history or his professional 
establishments. At first, it may be assumed, he 
taught fencing at his father's school in Carlisle 
Street. Later on, the salle d'armes which he men- 
tions oftenest is that formerly belonging to the 
Frenchman Redas in the Opera House buildings 
at the corner of the Haymarket, almost facing 
the Orange Coffee House, then the chosen re- 
sort of foreigners of all sorts. When the Opera 
was burned down in 1789, these rooms were de- 
stroyed, and Angelo apparently transferred his 
quarters to Bond Street. Under the heading 
" My Own Boastings," he gives a list of his 
titled and aristocratic pupils to the year 1817, 
and it is certainly an imposing one. ** In the 



Angela's ''Reminiscences.'' 55 

year of [Edmund] Kean's benefit" [182^?] he 
strained his thigh when fencing with the actor, 
and was thenceforth obliged "to bid adieu to 
the practical exertions of the science." His last 
years seem to have been passed in retirement at 
a village near Bath, and from his description of 
his means as " a small annuity " it must be pre- 
sumed that he was poor. He had been married, 
and he speaks of two of his sons to whom the 
Duke of York had given commissions in the 
army ; but that is all he says on the subject. 
Beside the two volumes of "Reminiscences," 
he compiled another miscellany of memories en- 
titled " Angelo's Pic-Nic," to which George 
Cruikshank contributed a characteristic frontis- 
piece. He also published a translation in smaller 
form of his father's " Ecole des Armes," a 
magnificent subscription folio which had first 
appeared in 1763.^ The translation was by 
Rowlandson, and the book so produced was 
afterwards inserted under the head Escrime in 
the " Encyclopedie " of Diderot and D'Alem- 
bert. Rowlandson also etched twenty-four 

1 Dominico Angelo, Lord Pembroke, and the Chevalier 
D'fion stood as models for the illustrations to this book, 
which were designed by Gwynn the painter. They were 
engraved by Grignion, Ryland, and Raimbach's master, 
Hall. 



5 6 Miscellanies. 

plates for Angelo on the use of the Hungarian 
and Highland broadsword, which were put 
forth in 1798-9 by T. Egerton of the Military 
Library -near Whitehall, Jie adventurous pub- 
lisher who subsequently issued the first three 
novels of Jane Austen. 



THE LATEST LiFE OF STEELE. 

ONE of the things that most pleased Lord 
Macaulay in connection with his famous 
article in the Edinburgh on Miss Aikin's " Life 
of Addison," was the confirmation of a minor 
statement which he had risked upon internal 
evidence. He had asserted confidently that 
Addison could never have spoken of Steele in 
the " Old Whig " as " Little Dickey ; " and by 
a stroke of good fortune, a few days after his 
article appeared, he found the evidence he re- 
quired. At a bookstall in Holborn he happened 
upon Chetwood's '^History of the Stage," and 
promptly discovered that " Little Dickey" was 
the nickname of Henry Norris, a diminutive 
actor who had made his first appearance as 
"Dicky" in Farquhar's "Constant Couple." 
Norris — it may be added — must have been a 
familiar figure to both Addison and Steele, be- 
cause, besides taking a female part in "The 
Funeral," he had played Mr. Tipkin in " The 
Tender Husband," which contained '^ many 
applauded strokes" from Addison's hand ; and, 



5 8 Miscellanies. 

only three years before Addison wrote the '* Old 
Whig," had also acted in Addison's own comedy 
of " The Drummer." But the anecdote, with 
its tardy exposure of a time-honoured blunder, 
aptly illustrates the main function of the modern 
biographer who deals with the great men of the 
last century. Rightly or wrongly — no doubt 
rightly as regards their leading characteristics — 
a certain conception of them has passed into 
currency, and it is no longer practicable to alter 
it materially. A " new view," if sufficiently in- 
genious or paradoxical, may appear to hold its 
own for a moment, but, as a rule, it lasts no 
longer. Swift, Addison, Pope, Steele, Field- 
ing, Goldsmith, Johnson, remain essentially 
what the common consent of the past has left 
them, and the utmost that latter-day industry can 
effect lies in the rectification of minute facts, and 
the tracing out of neglected threads of inquiry. 
Especially may it concern itself with that literary 
netto/age d sec which has for its object the atten- 
uation, and, if possible, the entire dispersing, of 
doubtful or discreditable tradition. 

Of this method of biography, the " Life of 
Steele,"^ by Mr. George A. Aitken is a favour- 
able, and even typical, example. That Mr. 

• 1 T^e Life of Richard Steele. By George A. Aitken, 
2 vols., London: Isbister, 1889. 



The Latest Life of Steele. 59 

Aitken is an enthusiast is plain ; but he is also 
an enthusiast of exceptional patience, acuteness, 
and tenacity of purpose. He manifestly set out 
determined to know all that could possibly be 
known about Steele, and for some five years 
(to judge by his first advertisements) he laboured 
unweariedly at his task. The mere authorities 
referred to in his notes constitute an ample liter- 
ature of the period, while the consultation of 
registers, the rummaging of records, and the 
general disturbance of contemporary pamphlets 
and documents which his inquiries must obvi- 
ously have entailed, are fairly enough to take 
one's breath away. That in these days of hasty 
research and hastier publication such a train of 
investigation should have been undertaken at all, 
is remarkable ; that so prolonged and arduous 
an effort should have been selected as the 
diploma-work of a young, and previously untried 
writer, is more remarkable still. It would have 
been discouraging in the last degree if so much 
industry and perseverance had been barren of 
result, and it is satisfactory to find that Mr. 
Aitken has been fortunate enough to add con- 
siderably to the existing material respecting 
Steele. In the pages that follow it is proposed, 
not so much to recapitulate Steele's story, as to 
emphasise, in their order, some of the more im- 



6o Miscellanies. 

portant discoveries which are due to his latest 
biographer. 

Richard Steele, as we know already, was born 
at Dublin in March, 1672 (N. S.), being thus 
about six weeks older than Addison, who first 
saw the light in the following May. Beyond 
some vague references in the Taller, nothing 
definite has hitherto been ascertained about his 
parents, although his father (also Richard 
Steele) was reported to have been a lawyer. 
But Mr. Aitken's investigations establish the 
fact that one Richard Steele, of Mountain 
(Monkstown), an attorney, was married in 1670 
to a widow named Elinor Symes. These were 
Steele's father and mother. Steele himself tells 
us (Taller, No. 181) that the former died when 
he was " not quite five years of age," and his 
mother, apparently, did not long survive her 
husband. The boy fell into the charge of his 
uncle, Henry Gascoigne, secretary to the first 
and second Dukes of Ormond. Gascoigne, con- 
cerning whom Mr. Aitken has recovered many 
particulars, had married a sister of one of 
Steele's parents. Through Ormond's influence 
his nephew was placed, in November, 1 684, upon 
the foundation at the Charterhouse. Two years 
later he was joined there by Addison. It was 
then the reign of Dr. Thomas Walker, after- 



The Latest Life of Steele. 6i 

wards " the ingenious T. W." of the Spectator, 
but nothing has been recovered as to Steele's 
school-days. In November, 1689^ he was elected 
to Christ Church, Oxford, with the usual exhi- 
bition of a boy on the Charterhouse foundation, 
and he matriculated in March, 1690, — ■ Addison, 
then a demy at Magdalen, having preceded him. 
Letters already printed by Mr. Wills and others 
show that Steele tried hard for a studentship 
at Christ Church ; but eventually he became a 
post-master at Merton, his college-tutor being 
Dr. Welbore Ellis, to whom he subsequently 
refers in the preface to the " Christian Hero." 
Of his intercourse with Addison at Smithfield 
and Oxford no record has come to light, and it 
is therefore still open to the essayist to piece the 
imperfections of this period by fictitious scores 
with the apple-woman or imaginary musings on 
the Merton terraces. But, in any such excur- 
sions in search of the picturesque, the fact that 
Steele was older instead of younger than Addi- 
son cannot safely be disregarded. 

Why Richard Steele quitted the University to 
become a " gentleman of the army " still remains 
obscure. His University career, if not brilliant, 
had been respectable, and he left Merton with 
the love of '' the whole Society." Perhaps, like 
his compatriot Goldsmith, he preferred a red coat 



62 Miscellanies. 

to a black one. At all events, in 1694, his rest- 
less Irish spirit prompted him to enlist as a cadet 
in the second troop of Horse Guards, then com- 
manded by his uncle's patron, James Butler, 
second Duke of Ormond. When he thus 
^' mounted a war-horse, with a great sword in 
his hand, and planted himself behind King Wil- 
liam the Third against Lewis the Fourteenth " 
he lost (he says) '^ the succession to a very good 
estate in the county of Wexford in Ireland ; " 
for which, failing further particulars, we may 
perhaps provisionally read " castle in Spain." 
His next appearance was among the crowd of 
minstrels who, in black-framed folio, mourned 
Queen Mary's death. Already he had written 
verse, and had even burned an entire comedy at 
college. The chief interest, however, of "The 
Procession," which was the particular name of 
this particular *' melodious tear," was its diplo- 
matic dedication to John, Lord Cutts, himself a 
versifier, and what was more important, also the 
newly appointed colonel of the Coldstream 
Guards. Cutts speedily sought out his anony- 
mous panegyrist, took him into his household, 
and eventually offered him a standard in his 
regiment. There is evidence, in the shape of 
transcripts from the Blenheim MSS., that Steele 
was acting as Cutts' secretary circa 1696-7 (a 



The Latest Life of Steele. 63 

circumstance of which, by the way, there is 
confirmation in Carleton's " Memoirs"^) ; and 
it has hitherto been supposed that by his employ- 
er's interest — for Cutts gave him little but pat- 
ronage — he became a captain in Lucas's Fusi- 
leers. Here, however, Mr. Aitken's cautious 
method discloses an unsuspected error. Steele 
is spoken of as a captain as early as 1700, and 
" Lord Lucas's Regiment of Foot" (not speci- 
fically " Fusileers ") was only raised in February, 
1702. If, therefore, before this date Steele had 
any right to the title of captain, it must have 
been as captain in the Coldstream Guards. 
Unfortunately, all efforts to trace him in the 
records of that regiment have hitherto proved 
unsuccessful. Neither as captain nor as ensign 
could its historian, General MacKinnon, though 
naturally watchful on the point, find any mention 
of his name. 

By 1700 the former post-master of Merton 
had become a seasoned man about town, a rec- 
ognised wit, and an habitual frequenter of Will's. 
" Dick Steel is yours," writes Congreve to a 

^ " At the time appointed " (says Carleton, writing at 
the date of the Assassination Plot of 1696) "I waited on 
his lordship [Lord Cutts], where I met Mr. Steel (now 
Sir Richard, and at that time his secretary), who immedi- 
ately introduced me." (" Memoirs," 1728, ch. iii.) 



64 Miscellanies. 

friend early in the year. Already, too, there 
are indications that he had begun to feel the 
"want of pence which vexes public men." 
From this, however, as well as his part in the 
coffee-house crusade against Dryden's " Quack 
Maurus/' Blackmore, we must pass to Mr. 
Aitken's next rectification. That Steele fought 
a duel is already known. That it was forced 
upon him, that he endeavoured in every honour- 
able way to evade it, and that finally, by mis- 
adventure, he all but killed his man, have been 
often circumstantially related. But the date of 
the occurrence has always been a mystery. 
Calling Luttrell and the FljHng-Post to his 
aid, Mr. Aitken has ascertained that the place 
was Hyde Park, the time June i6, 1700, and 
the other principal an Irishman, named Kelly. 
Luttrell's description of Steele as '^ Capt. Steele, 
of the Lord Cutts regiment," is confirmatory 
of the assumption that he was a captain in the 
Guards. Whether this was his only " affair of 
honour," or whether there were others, is 
doubtful ; but it is not improbable that the re- 
pentant spirit engendered by this event, for his 
adversary's life long hung trembling in the bal- 
ance, is closely connected with the publication, 
if not the preparation, of the " Christian Hero," 
which made its appearance a few months later. 



The Latest Life of Steele. 65 

Upon the scheme of this curious and by no 
means uninstructive manual, once so nearly for- 
gotten as to be described as a poem, it is not 
necessary to linger now. But it may be noted 
that it was dated from the Tower Guard, where 
it was written, and that the governor of the 
Tower was the Lord Lucas in whose regiment 
Steele became an officer. 

The year of which the first months witnessed 
the publication of the "Christian Hero" wit- 
nessed in its close the production of Steele's 
first play, and, inconsequently enough, the one 
was the cause of the other. It was an almost 
inevitable result of the book that many of the 
author's former associates were alienated from 
him, while others, not nicely sensitive to the 
distinction drawn in Boileau's ami de la verlu 
pluiot que vertueux, maliciously contrasted his 
precepts with his practice. Finding himself 
"slighted" (he says) "instead of being encour- 
aged, for his declarations as to religion," it be- 
came " incumbent upon him to enliven his char- 
acter, for which reason he writ the comedy 
called ' The Funeral,' in which (though full of 
incidents that move laughter) Virtue and Vice 
appear just as they ought to do." In other 
words, Steele endeavoured to swell that tide of 
reformation which Collier had set flowing by his 
S 



66 Miscellanies. 

" Short View of the Immorality and Profane- 
ness of the English Stage," and he followed up 
his first effort of 1701 by the " Lying Lover" 
(1703) and the " Tender Husband" (1705), the 
second of which was avowedly written " in 
the severity Collier required." His connection 
with the purification of the contemporary drama, 
however, would lead us too far from the special 
subject of this paper, — the revised facts of his 
biography. Among these, the order of the plays 
as given above is an important item. Owing 
to some traditional misconception, the " Lying 
Lover," which was a rather over-emphatic pro- 
test against duelling, was believed by all the 
older writers to be the last of Steele's early dra- 
matic efforts. As a natural consequence, its 
being ^' damned for its piety " was made respon- 
sible for the author's long abstinence from the 
task of theatrical regeneration. Unfortunately 
for logic, the facts which, in this instance, Mr. 
Aitken has extended rather than discovered, are 
diametrically opposed to any such convenient 
arrangement. The "Tender Husband," and 
not the " Lying Lover," was the last of Steele's 
first three plays, — that is to say, the moralised 
Collier mixture was succeeded by a strong infu- 
sion of Moli^re, while, so far from leaving off 
writing for the stage, there is abundant evidence 



The Latest Life of Steele. 67 

that, but for other cares and more absorbing 
occupations, Steele would speedily have pro- 
ceeded to "enliven his character" with a fresh 
comedy. Indeed, in a very instructive suit 
against Christopher Rich of Drury Lane, which 
Mr. Aitken has exhumed from the Chancery 
Pleadings in the Record Office, mention is made 
of what may well have been the performance in 
question. It was to have treated a subject 
essayed both by Gay and Mrs. Centlivre, the 
" Election of Gotham." 

The Chancery suit above referred to, which 
arose out of the profits of the "Tender Hus- 
band," began in 1707. Early in 1702 Steele 
had become a "captain in Lucas's, and ^between 
that date and 1704 must have spent a consider- 
able portion of his time at Landguard Fort, do- 
ing garrison duty with his company. He lodged, 
according to report, in a farmhouse at Walton. 
Mr. Aitken prints from various sources several 
new letters which belong to this period, to- 
gether with some account of another in the 
long series of lawsuits about money with which 
Steele's biography begins to be plentifully be- 
sprinkled. In an autograph now in the Mor- 
rison collection, we find him certifying with 
Addison to the unimpeachable character of one 
" Margery Maplesden, late Sutler at the Tilt- 



68 Miscellanies. 

yard Guard/' and we get passing glances of him 
at the Kit Cat Club and elsewhere. Perhaps 
we are right, too, in placing about this date the 
account of his search for the '' philosopher's 
stone." The details of this episode in his career 
rest mainly upon the narrative of Mrs. De la 
Riviere Manley, the author of that " cornucopia 
of scandal," the " New Atalantis ; " but there is 
little doubt that there was ground for the story, 
since Steele himself, in later life, printed, with- 
out contradiction, a reference to it in Town 
Talk, and it is besides connected with the 
next of Mr. Aitken's discoveries. According to 
'^Rivella," an empiric, who found the sanguine 
Steele " a bubble to his mind/' engaged him in 
the pursuit of the magnum arcanum. Furnaces 
were built without delay, and Steele's available 
resources began to vanish rapidly. In these 
transactions Mrs. Manley's husband played 
an ambiguous part, and, if we are to believe 
her, she herself impersonated the Dea ex 
machina, and warned Steele that he was being 
duped. It was not too soon. He only just 
saved his last negotiable property, his commis- 
sion, and had to go into hiding. *' Fortune," 
Mrs. Manley continues, "did more for him in 
his adversity than would have lain in her way 
in prosperity ; she threw him to seek for refuge 



The Latest Life of Steele. 69 

in a house where was a lady with very large 
possessions ; he married her, she settled all 
upon him, and died soon after." 

This — and to some extent it is a corrobora- 
tion of the story — was Steele's first wife, who 
until now has been little more than a shifting 
shadow in his biography. Her actual personal- 
ity still remains veiled ; but Mr. Aitken with 
infinite pains has ascertained her name, and a 
number of facts about her family. She was a 
West Indian widow called Margaret Stretch, 
who had inherited an estate in Barbados of 
;^8^o a year from her brother, Major Ford. 
Steele married her in the spring of 170^, and 
buried her two years later. There is some 
indication that her death was caused by a fright 
given her (when enceinte) by Steele's only sister, 
who was insane; but upon, this point nothing 
definite can be affirmed. Looking to the cir- 
cumstances in which (as narrated by Mrs. 
Manley) the acquaintanceship began, it is not 
improbable that the personal charms of the lady 
had less to do with the marriage than the beaux 
yeux de sa cassette. In any case Steele can 
scarcely escape the imputation which usually 
attaches to the union of a needy bachelor with 
a wealthy widow, and, as will presently be seen, 
he was not long inconsolable. 



70 Miscellanies. 

Whether, even at the time of the marriage, 
the Barbados estate was really productive of 
much ready money may be doubted. But in 
August, 1706, Steele was appointed Gentle- 
man Waiter to Queen Anne's consort, Prince 
George of Denmark, and a few weeks after his 
wife's death, through the recommendation of 
Arthur Mainwaring, one of the members of the 
Kit Cat Club, Harley, then a Secretary of State, 
gave him the post of Gazetteer with an in- 
creased salary of ;^300 a year. " The writer 
of the * Gazette' now," says Hearne in May, 
1707, "is Captain Steel, who is the author of 
several romantic things, and is accounted an 
ingenious man." As " Captain Steele " he con- 
tinued for many years to be known, but it is 
assumed that he left the army before his second 
marriage, which now followed. To his first 
wife's funeral had come as mourner a lady of 
about nine and twenty, the daughter of a de- 
ceased gentleman of Wales, and the Miss Mary 
Scurlock who has since become historical as the 
" Prue " of the well-known Steele letters in 
the British Museum. That she was an heiress, 
and, as Mrs. Manley says, a " cried-up beauty," 
was known, though in the absence of definite 
pictorial assurance of the latter fact, it has 
hitherto been difficult to see her with the admir- 



The Latest Life of Steele. 71 

ing eyes of the enthusiastic writer who signs 
himself her " most obsequious obedient hus- 
band/' But while unable to add greatly to our 
knowledge of her character, Mr. Aitken has 
succeeded in discovering and copying her por- 
trait by Kneller, a portrait which sufficiently jus- 
tifies her husband's raptures. In Sir Godfrey's 
" animated canvas," she is shown as a very beau- 
tiful brunette, in a cinnamon satin dress, with a 
high, almost too high, forehead, and dark, bril- 
liant eyes. Steele's phrase " little wife " must 
have been a " dear diminutive," for she is not 
especially pe/ife, but rather what Fielding's Mrs. 
James would style '' a very fine person of a 
woman," and she has an arch, humourous expres- 
sion which suggests the wit with which she is 
credited. From the absence of a ring it has 
been conjectured that the portrait was taken 
before marriage. But Kneller was much more 
likely to have painted Mrs. Steele than Miss 
Scurlock, and the simple explanation may be 
either that rings were neglected or that the 
hands were painted in from a model. As in the 
case of Mrs. Stretch, Mr. Aitken has collected 
a mass of information about Mrs. Steele's rela- 
tions. His good luck has also helped him to 
one veritable find. In her letter to her mother 
announcing her engagement, Miss Scurlock re- 



72 Miscellanies. 

fers scornfully to a certain '' wretched impudence, 
H. O.," who had recently written to her. This 
was manifestly a rejected but still importunate 
suitor, although the precise measure of his implied 
iniquity remained unrevealed. From documents 
now first printed by Mr. Aitken, it seems that 
his name was Henry Owen of Glassalt, Carmar- 
thenshire, and that he was an embarrassed wid- 
ower of (in the circuitous language of the law) 
" thirty, thirty-five, or forty years of age at the 
most '' — that is to say, he was over forty. 
Miss Scurlock had known him as a neighbour 
from childhood, and for four or five years past, 
at Bath, at London, and at other places, he, 
being a needy man with an entailed estate, had 
been besieging her with his addresses. Only 
two years before her engagement to Steele, 
finding her obdurate, he had trumped up a suit 
against her for breach of contract of marriage, 
which apparently was not successful. The 
"Libel" and "Answer," which Mr. Aitken 
prints from the records of the Consistorial 
Court of London, are more curious than edify- 
ing, and tend to show that Owen was rather 
a cur. But the whole story is useful indirectly 
as suggesting that Miss Scurlock's constitu- 
tional prudery was not the only reason why she 
surrounded Steele's worship of her with so 



The Latest Life of Steele, 73 

much mystery. Abhorrence of ** public do- 
ings " in " changing the name of lover for hus- 
band " was certainly superficially justifiable in 
the circumstances. A gentleman who had 
brought a suit against her in 1704 for breach of 
contract, and was still pestering her in August, 
1707, with his unpalatable attentions, was quite 
capable of putting awkward obstacles in the 
way of that other ardent wooer from Lord 
Sunderland's office in Whitehall, who, in order 
to pay his court to " the beautifullest object in 
the world," was confessedly neglecting the 
*' Gazette " and the latest news from Ostend. 
According to the license the marriage was to 
have taken place at St. Margaret's, Westmin- 
ster ; but the registers of that church, as well as 
those of St. James's, Piccadilly, and St. Martin's- 
in-the-Fields, have been fruitlessly searched for 
the record, and it is clear that, for some days, 
the ceremony was kept a secret, pending the 
arrival from Wales of Mrs. Scurlock's consent. 
It probably took place on the 9th of September, 
1707, the day after the license was granted. In 
the previous month of August, Steele had rented 
a house, now no longer standing, in Bury Street, 
close to the turning out of Jermyn Street. This 
was a quarter of the town described by contem- 
porary advertisements as in close proximity '' to 



74 Miscellanies. 

St. James's Church, Chapel, Park, Palace, Cof- 
fee and Chocolate Houses" — in other words, 
it was in the very heart of the beau monde ; and 
here Steele, moreover, would be within easy 
distance of the Court, and the Cockpit at 
Whitehall. He appears to have begun his estab- 
lishment upon the lavish footing of a gentleman 
whose expectations are larger than his means, 
and whose wife's dignity demands, if not " the 
gilt coach and dappled Flanders mares " of 
Pope's Pamela, at least a chariot, a lady's-maid, 
and an adequate equipment of cinnamon satin. 
On paper his yearly income from all sources, 
Mrs. Scurlock's allowance not included, was 
about ;^i2 5o. But by far the largest portion of 
this was derived from the Barbados property, 
which, besides being encumbered by legacies, 
seems to have made irregular returns. His 
salary as Gazetteer was also subject to " deduc- 
tions," and as with the modest pay of a captain 
in Lucas's he had dabbled in alchemy, he was 
probably considerably in debt. The prospect 
was not a cheerful one, either for him or for 
" Prue," as he soon begins to call his more cir- 
cumspect better-half, and the signs of trouble 
are speedily present. Always irrepressibly san- 
guine, and generally without ready money, he is 
constantly turning some pecuniary corner or 



The Latest Life of Steele. 75 

other, not without anticipations and borrowings 
that bring their inevitable train of actions and 
bailiifs. All this has to be gently tempered to 
the apprehensive " Prue," who, to her other 
luxuries, contrives to add a confidante, described 
as Mrs. (probably here it means Miss) Binns. 
Meanwhile her husband, bustling to and fro, 
now detained in his passage by a friend (and a 
"pint of wine"), — now, it is to be feared, 
attentively "shadowed" by the watchful 
" shoulder-dabbers," — scribbles off, from re- 
mote "blind taverns" and other casual coigns 
of vantage, a string of notes and notelets de- 
signed to keep his "Absolute Governess" at 
Bury Street minutely acquainted with his doings. 
Through all of these the '^ dusky strand " of the 
" West Indian business" — in other words, the 
protracted negotiation for the sale of the Barba- 
dos property — winds languidly and inextricably. 
Steele's letters to his wife, accessible in the 
reprints by Nichols of 1787 and 1809, are, how- 
ever, too well known to need description, and 
although Mr. Aitken has collated them with the 
originals, he does not profess to have made any 
material addition to their riches. As they pro- 
gress, they record more than one of the various 
attempts at advancement with which their writer, 
egged on by his ambition and his embarrass- 



76 Miscellanies. 

ments, is perpetually preoccupied. To-day it is 
a gentleman-ushership that seems within his 
reach, to-morrow he is hoping to be Under- 
Secretary, vice Addison promoted to Ireland. 
Then the strange disquieting figure of Swift ap- 
pears upon the scene, not, as it seems, to exer- 
cise its usual power of fascination over " Prue," 
by whom — Swift declares later — Steele is 
governed " most abominably, as bad as Marl- 
borough." With April, 1709, comes the estab- 
lishment of the Tatler, and we enter upon 
thrice-gleaned ground. The period covered by 
•^Mr. Bickerstaff's Lucubrations" and their 
successor, the Spectator, lighted as it is by stray 
side-rays from the wonderful "Journal to 
Stella," offers few opportunities for fresh illumi- 
nation. Mr. Aitken's account of the inception 
of the two papers, and of their several imitators, 
is copious and careful, but beyond printing from 
the Blenheim MSS. some interesting accounts 
of Tonson, bearing upon the sale of the collected 
editions, and, from the British Museum, an 
assignment to Buckley the bookseller of a share 
in the Spectator, he adds nothing that is abso- 
lutely new to what has already been collected 
by Drake, Percy, Chalmers, Nichols, and other 
writers. With respect to the unexplained ces- 
sation of the Tatler, he apparently inclines to 



The Latest Life of Steele. yy 

the view that it was in some sort the result of 
an understanding with Harley, by which Steele, 
having been deprived of his Gazetteership as a 
caution, was allowed to retain, quamdiu se bene 
gesserit, his recently acquired appointment as 
Commissioner of Stamps. But it is not probable 
that we shall ever know much more of a trans- 
action concerning which Addison was uncon- 
sulted, and Swift uninformed. With all his 
customary openness, Steele could, if he pleased, 
keep his own counsel, and he seems to have 
done so on this occasion. 

Nor are we really any wiser as to the reasons 
for the termination of the Spectator m December, 
1 71 2, except that we know it to have been pre- 
meditated, since the Guardian was projected 
before the Spectator ceased to appear. From 
the Berkeley letters among Lord Egmont's 
MSS., we learn that Steele was once more 
dallying with his first love, the stage ; and from 
the same source that, either early in February or 
late in January, the death of his mother-in-law 
had put him in possession of ;^5oo per annum. 
To this improvement in his affairs is doubtless 
traceable that increased spirit of independence 
which precipitated what all lovers of letters 
must regard as his disastrous plunge into politics. 
Whatever the origin of the Guardian, and how- 



yS Miscellanies. 

ever sincere its opening protests of neutrality, 
the situation was far too strained for one who, 
having a journal at his command, had been from 
his youth a partisan of the Revolution, and had 
already made rash entry into party quarrels. 
Before May, 171 3, he was involved in bitter hos- 
tilities with Swift, arising out of a Tory attack 
on the Nottinghams for their desertion to the 
Whigs. A few weeks later found him insisting 
upon the demolition, under the Treaty of Utrecht, 
of the harbour and fortifications of Dunkirk, 
which demolition, it was shrewdly suspected, 
the Ministry were intending to forego. In June 
he had resigned his Commissionership of Stamps, 
and in August he was elected member for the 
borough of Stockbridge. Almost concurrently 
he issued a pamphlet entitled " The Importance 
of Dunkirk consider'd." Swift, henceforth 
hanging always upon his traces, retorted with 
one of his cleverest pamphlets, "The Impor- 
tance of the Guardian considered," and the 
" underspur-leathers " of the Tory press began 
also to ply their pens against Steele, who by this 
time had dropped the Guardian for a professedly 
political organ, the Englishman. Shortly after- 
wards he issued "The Crisis," a pamphlet on 
the Hanoverian succession, which Swift followed 
by his masterly ^' Publick Spirit of the Whigs." 



p 



The Latest Life of Steele. 79 



No sooner had Steele taken his seat in the 
House in February than he found that in the 
eyes of those in power he was a marked man. 
He was at once impeached for seditious utter- 
ances in " The Crisis," and, though he seems to 
have made an able defence, was expelled. Then, 
after a fev/ doubtful months. Queen Anne died, 
his party came into power, and his troubles as a 
politician were at an end. In his best pamphlet, 
his " Apology for Himself and his Writings," he 
has given an account of this part of his career. 

That career, as far as literature is concerned, 
may be said to close with the publication of 
the " Apology," in October, 1714. Not many 
months afterwards, on presenting an address, he 
was knighted by King George. During the rest 
of his life, which was prolonged to September, 
1729, when he died at Carmarthen, he continued 
to publish various periodicals and tracts, none 
of which is of great importance. In December, 
17 1 8, Lady Steele died, and four years later 
her husband produced a fourth comedy, that 
"Conscious Lovers" which honest Parson 
Adams declared to be (in parts) " almost solemn 
enough for a sermon," but which is neverthe- 
less, perhaps by reason of Cibber's collabora- 
tion, one of the best constructed of his plays. 
Part of Mr. Aitken's second volume is occu- 



8o Miscellanies. 

pied by Steele's connection, as patentee and 
manager, with Drury Lane Theatre, concern- 
ing which he has brought together much curious 
and hitherto unpublished information. Other 
points upon which new light is thrown are 
the publication of " The Ladies Library," the 
establishment of the " Censorium," Steele's 
application for the Mastership of the Charter- 
house, Mr. John Rollos and his mechanical 
hoop-petticoat, the failure of Steele's once fa- 
mous contrivance, the Fish-Pool, his connection 
with the Dyers, etc. But it would be impos- 
sible to schedule in detail the numerous in- 
stances in which Mr. Aitken has been able 
either to supplement the existing material or to 
supersede it by new. A careful and exhaustive 
bibliography is not the least of his achievements. 
As regards Steele's character, Mr. Aitken's 
inquiries further enforce the conclusion that 
in any estimate of it, considerable allowance 
must be made for the influence of that miserable 
and malicious contemporary gossip, of which, as 
Fielding says, the ''only basis is lying." For 
much of this, Steele's ill-starred excursion into 
faction is obviously responsible. ^^ Scandal be- 
tween Whig and Tory," said the ingenuous and 
experienced author of the " New Atalantis," 
" goes for nothing," and apart from her specific 



The Latest Life of Steele. 8i 

recantation in the dedication to *' Lucius/' this 
sentiment alone should suffice to discredit her, 
at all events in the absence of anything like 
corroborative evidence. The attacks of Dennis 
and the rest are as worthless. We know that 
Steele was not " descended from a trooper's 
horse," and we know that he was not " born at 
Carrickfergus " (whatever social disqualification 
that particular accident may entail). Why 
should we listen to the circulators of these or 
other stories — those of Savage, for example? 
With respect to Swift, the most dangerous be- 
cause the most powerful detractor, it is clear, 
from the way in which he speaks of Steele and 
Steele's abilities before the strife of party had 
estranged them, that, if they had never quarrelled, 
he would have ranked him only a little lower than 
Addison.^ And if Steele has suffered from scan- 
dal and misrepresentation, he has also suffered 
from his own admissions. The perfect frankness 
and freedom of his letters has been accepted 
too literally. Charming and unique as they are, 

1 Swift's extraordinary pertinacity of hatred to Steele 
cannot wholly be explained by his sense of Steele's in- 
gratitude. Steele had wounded him hopelessly in his 
most vulnerable part — he had laughed at his pretensions 
to political omnipotency, and he had (as Swift thought) 
also challenged his Christianity. 
6 



82 Miscellanies. 

they leave upon many, who do not sufficiently 
bear in mind their extremely familiar character, 
an ill-defined impression that he was over-uxorious, 
over-sentimental. But a man is not necessarily 
this for a few extravagant billets-doux, or many 
irreproachable persons who now, in the time- 
honoured words of Mr. Micawber, "walk erect 
before their fellow-men/' would incur the like 
condemnation. Again, it is, to all appearance, 
chiefly due to the careless candour of some half- 
dozen of these documents that Steele has been 
branded as a drunkard. The fact is that, in an 
age when to take too much wine was no dis- 
grace, he was neither better nor worse than his 
contemporaries ; and there is besides definite 
evidence that he was easily overcome — far more 
easily than Addison. As regards his money 
difficulties, they cannot be denied. But they 
were the difficulties of improvidence and not of 
profligacy, of a man who, with Fielding's joy of 
life and Goldsmith's " knack of hoping," always 
rated an uncertain income at its highest and not 
at its average amount, and who, moreover, paid 
his debts before he died. For the rest, upon 
the question of his general personality, it will 
suffice to cite one unimpeachable witness, whose 
testimony has only of late years come to light. 
Berkeley, who VvTote for the Guardian, and 



The Latest Life of Steele. 83 

visited Steele much at Bloomsbury (where he 
saw nothing of Savage's bailiffs in livery), speaks 
expressly, in a letter to Sir John Perceval, of his 
love and consideration for his wife, of the gen- 
erosity and benevolence of his temper, of his 
cheerfulness, his wit, and his good sense. He 
should hold it, he says, a sufficient recompense 
for writing the "Treatise on Human Know- 
ledge" that it gained him "some share in the 
friendship of so worthy a man." The praise 
of Berkeley — Berkeley, to whom Pope gives 
" every virtue under heaven," and who is cer- 
tainly one of the noblest figures of the century 
— outweighs whole cartloads of Grub-street 
scandal and skip-kennel pamphleteers. 

With Steele's standing as a man of letters we 
are on surer ground, since his own works speak 
for him without the distortions of tradition. To 
the character of poet he made no pretence, nor 
could he, although — witness the Horatian lines 
to Marlborough, which Mr. Aitken now dates 
1709 — he possessed the eighteenth-century fac- 
ulty of easy octosyllabics. Of his plays it has 
been said that they resemble essays rather than 
dramas, a judgment which sets one wondering 
what would have been the critic's opinion if 
Steele had never written the Spectator, and 
the Tatler. It is perhaps more to the point 



84 Miscellanies. 

that their perception of strongly marked humour- 
ous character is far more obvious than their 
stage-craft, and that their shortcomings in this 
latter respect are heightened by Steele's debata- 
ble endeavours not (as Covi^per says) " to let 
down the pulpit to the level of the stage," but 
to lift the stage to a level with the pulpit. As 
a political writer, his honesty and enthusiasm 
were not sufficient to secure him permanent 
success in a line where they are not always 
thrice-armed that have their quarrel just ; and 
it is no discredit to him that he was unable to 
contend against the deadly irony of Swift. It is 
as an essayist that he will be best remembered. 
In the past, it has been too much the practice 
to regard him as the humbler associate of Addi- 
son. We now know that he deserves a much 
higher place ; that Addison, in fact, was quite 
as much indebted to Steele's inventive gifts as 
Steele could possibly have been indebted to 
Addison's sublimating spirit. It may be that he 
was a more negligent writer than Addison ; it 
may be that he was inferior as a literary artist ; 
but the genuineness of his feelings frequently 
carries him farther. Not a few of his lay ser- 
mons on anger, pride, flattery, magnanimity, and 
so forth, are unrivalled in their kind. He ral- 
lied the follies of society with unfailing tact and 



The Latest Life of Steele. 85 

good-humour ; he rebuked its vices with ad- 
mirable courage and dignity ; and he wrote of 
women and children as, in his day, no writer 
had hitherto dared to do. As the first painter 
of domesticity, the modern novel owes him 
much. But modern journalism owes him more, 
since — to use some words of his great ad- 
versary — he "refined it first, and showed its 
use." 

Mr. Aitken's book has been described in the 
title to this paper as the "latest" Life of Steele. 
It will probably be the " last." No one, at all 
events, is likely to approach the subject again 
with the same indefatigable energy of research. 
To many of us, indeed, Biography, conceived in 
this uncompromising fashion, would be a thing 
impossible. To shrink from no investigation, 
however tedious, to take nothing at second- 
hand, to verify everything, to cross-examine 
everything, to leave no smallest stone unturned 
in the establishment of the most infinitesimal 
fact — these are conditions which presuppose a 
literary constitution of iron. It is but just to 
note that the method has its drawbacks. So nar- 
row an attention to minuti^ tends to impair the 
selective power, and the defect of Mr. Aitken's 
work is, almost of necessity, its superabundance. 
It will be said that his determination to discover 



86 Miscellanies. 

has sometimes carried him too far afield ; that 
much of these two handsome volumes might 
with advantage have been committed to the safe- 
keeping of an appendix ; that the mass of detail, 
in short, is out of proportion to its actual rele- 
vance. To this, in all likelihood, the author 
would answ^er that his book is not designed (in 
Landor's phrase) to lie — 

" With summer sweets, with albums gaily drest, 
Where poodle snifts at flower between the leaves;" 

that he does not put it forward as a study or 
critical monograph ; but that it is a leisurely 
and conscientious effort, reproducing much out- 
of-the-way information which is the lawful prize 
of his individual bow and spear ; and that, 
rather than lose again what has been so painfully 
acquired, he is prepared to risk the charge of 
surplusage, content if his labours be recognised 
as the fullest and most trustworthy existing con- 
tribution towards the life and achievements of 
a distinguished man of letters who died nearly 
one hundred and seventy years ago. And this 
recognition his labours undoubtedly deserve. 



THE AUTHOR OF ''MONSIEUR 
TONSON." 

''■^TEVER have a porch to your paper.'* 
JL N Acting upon this excellent maxim of 
the late Master of Balliol, we may at once ex- 
plain that " Monsieur Tonson " is the title of a 
long-popular recitation. It recounts, in rhyme 
of the Wolcot and Colman order, how, in the 
heyday of hoaxes and practical joking, a wag, 
called King in the verses, persecutes an unhappy 
French refugee in St. Giles's with repeated 
nightly inquiries for an imaginary " Mr. Thomp- 
son," until at length his maddened victim flies the 
house. And here comes in the effective point 
of the story. After a protracted absence abroad, 
the tormentor returns to London, when the 
whim seizes him to knock once more at the old 
door with the old question. By an extraordinary 
coincidence the Frenchman has just resumed 
residence in his former dwelling. 



88 Miscellanies. 

Without one thought of the relentless foe, 
Who, fiend-like, haunted him so long ago, 

Just in his former trim he now appears : 
The waistcoat and the nightcap seemed the same, 
With rushlight, as before, he creeping came, 

And King's detested voice astonish'd hears, — 

the result being that he takes flight again, '' and 
ne'er is heard of more." The author of this jeu 
d'esprit was John Taylor, the oculist and jour- 
nalist ; and it originated in a current anecdote, 
either actually founded on fact or invented by a 
Governor of Jamaica. After a prosperous career 
in prose, Taylor versified it for Fawcett, the 
comedian, who was giving recitations at the 
Freemasons' Tavern. It had an extraordinary 
vogue ; was turned by Moncrieff into a farce 
(in which Gatti, and afterwards Matthews, took 
the leading part of Monsieur Morbleu, the 
Frenchman) ; was illustrated by Robert Cruik- 
shank, and still, we are told, makes furtive 
appearance in popular ^' Reciters." By describ- 
ing himself on the title-page of his memoirs as 
" Author of ' Monsieur Tonson,' " its writer 
plainly regarded the poem as his passport to 
fame ; and whether one agrees with him or not, 
it may safely be taken as a pretext for some ac- 
count of the gossiping and discursive volumes 
which contain his recollections. 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson.''' 89 

John Taylor's grandfather, also John, was a 
person of considerable importance in his day, 
being indeed none other than the notorious 
oculist, or " Ophthalmiater,'' known as the 
" Chevalier" Taylor. Irreverent persons seem 
to have hinted that, as a matter of fact, this new- 
fangled Ophthalmiater meant no more than old 
Quack "writ large ;" and one William Hogarth, 
generally on the side of the irreverent, hitched 
the Chevalier into a well-known satirical etching 
which collectors entitle indifferently " Consulta- 
tion of Physicians" or "Company of Under- 
takers." Here the gifted recipient (as per 
advertisement) of so many distinctions " Pon- 
tifical, Imperial, and Royal," appears ignobly 
with Mrs. Sarah Mapp, the Epsom bone-setter, 
and that famous Dr. Joshua Ward, referred to 
by Fielding, whose pill (like a much-vaunted 
nostrum of our own day) had the property of 
posting at once to the part affected. Yet the 
Chevalier, despite inordinate vanity, and a fond- 
ness for fine clothes which made him fair game 
for the mocker, was undoubtedly a man of ability. 
"He has a good person, is a natural orator, and 
has a facility of learning foreign languages " — 
says Dr. King, who met him at Tunbridge ; and 
apart from the circumstance that he had been a 
pupil of Cheselden the anatomist, he was really 



90 Miscellanies. 

a very skilful operator for cataract, and wrote a 
long list of works or pamphlets on the eye. He 
was a familiar figure in the different Courts of 
Europe for his cures, real and imaginary, the 
story of which he relates — without showing any 
" remarkable diffidence in recording his own tal- 
ents and attainments," says his grandson — in 
three volumes of Memoirs,^ having a longer title- 
page than that of " Pamela/' Judging from his 
own account (which should probably be taken 
with the fullest allowance of cautionary salt), his 
experiences must have been peculiar, and his visit- 
ing list unusually varied. He asserts, without 
much detail, that he knew Lord Bath and Jack 
Sheppard ; Mary Tofts, the Godalming rabbit- 
breeder, and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. 

1 "The History of the Travels and Adventures of the 
Chevalier John Taylor, Ophthalmiater . . . Author of 45 
works in different Languages : the Produce for upwards 
of Thirty years, of the greatest Practice in the Cure of 
distempered Eyes, of any in the Age we live [sic] — Who 
has been in every Court, Kingdom, Province, State, City, 
and Town of the least Consideration in all Europe, with- 
out exception. Written by Himself . . . Qui Visum 
Vitam Dat. London : J. Williams, 1761-2." This must 
not be confounded with the " Life " in two volumes pub- 
lished by Cooper in 1761, a coarse catchpenny invention 
by Lord Chesterfield's profligate protege, the bricklayer 
poet, Henry Jones. 



The Author of '* Monsieur Tonson.'' 91 

He also professed acquaintance with Marshals 
Saxe and Keith ; with Pollnitz of the " Virgin- 
ians ; " with Theodore, the bankrupt King of 
Corsica ; with Boerhaave, Albinus, Linnaeus, 
Pope, Voltaire, Metastasio, La Fontaine, etc. 
(If the fabulist be intended, there is clearly some 
mistake, since La Fontaine departed this life 
about eight years before the Chevalier was born.) 
He was a witness, he says, of the execution of 
Counsellor Christopher Layer for high treason, 
and he affirms that he was actually present in the 
Old Bailey upon that memorable occasion when 
Blake (alias Blue-skin) tried to cut the throat of 
Jonathan Wild. Having seen many men and 
cities, and full of honours — chiefly of foreign 
manufacture — the Chevalier died in a convent at 
Prague in 1780. At the time of his death, it may 
be noted, the famous Ophthalmiater was himself 
blind. He can scarcely be said to have wanted a 
vaies sacer, for Churchill mentions him in " The 
Ghost:" — 

Behold the Chevalier — 
As well prepared, beyond all doubt, 
To put Eyes in, as put them out. 

And Walpole gave him a not very happy 
epigram : — 



92 Miscellanies. 

Why Taylor the quack calls himself Chevaliery 

'T is not easy a reason to render ; 
Unless blinding eyes, that he thinks to make clear, 

Demonstrates he 's but a Pretender. 

His only son, John Taylor the Second, was 
also an oculist, but not of equal eminence, al- 
though one of his cures — that of a boy born 
blind — obtained the honours of a pamphlet by 
Oldys the antiquary, and a portrait by Worlidge 
the etcher. At the Chevalier's death John Tay- 
lor applied for the post, which his father had 
held, of oculist to the King, but the appoint- 
ment was given to the Baron de Wenzel, one of 
the Chevalier's pupils, who had been fortunate 
enough to operate successfully on the old Duke 
of Bedford, of ''Junius" notoriety. To John 
Taylor the Second succeeded John Taylor the 
Third, the '' Author of ' Monsieur Tonson.' " 
Beginning life as an oculist, like his father and 
grandfather, he achieved considerable reputation 
in that capacity, and by good luck obtained at 
Wenzel's death the very appointment which his 
father had failed to secure. But in mid-career 
he relinquished his profession for journalism. 
For many years he was proprietor and editor of 
the Sun newspaper, and in 1827 he also pub- 
lished a couple of volumes of prologues, epi- 
logues, sonnets, and occasional verses. His 



The Author of ''Monsieur Tonson.'' 93 

chief reputation, however, was that of a racon- 
teur. " In his latter days," says the Literary- 
Gazette, in its obituary notice of May 19, 1832, 
he '• was, perhaps, as entertaining in conversa- 
tion, with anecdote, playfulness, and satire, as 
any man within the bills of mortality/' Many 
of his good things are preserved in the two vol- 
umes of " Records of My Life " which appeared 
shortly after his death, ^ to the compilation of 
which he was impelled by the perfidy of a former 
partner and the invitation of an " eminent pub- 
lisher," presumably Mr. Edward Bull, of Holies 
Street, whose imprint the volumes bear. His 
recollections are set down without any other 
method than a certain rough grouping ; they 
have the garrulity and the repetitions of the 
advanced age at which they were penned ; but 
they contain, in addition to a good deal that he 
had heard from others, much that had come 
within his own experiences. As he professes 
strict veracity, it is from the latter class that we 
shall chiefly make selection, beginning as in duty 
bound, with the anecdotes of literary men. 

1 " Records of my Life ; by the late John Taylor, 
Esquire, Author of ' Monsieur Tonson.' " 2 vols. Lon- 
don : Bull, 1832. The copy belonging to the present 
writer contains, besides inserted photographs, '* Addenda " 
by John Stirling Taylor, the author's son. 



94 Miscellanies. 

Concerning Johnson and Goldsmith he has 
not much to say beyond the fact that, as a boy, 
he had once delivered a letter for the latter at 
the Temple, but without seeing him. It is, how- 
ever, to the '' Author of ' Monsieur Tonson'" 
that we owe the historic episode of the borrowed 
guinea slipped under the door, which recurs so 
prominently in all Goldsmith's biographies ; while 
he tells one anecdote of Johnson which, as far as 
we can discover, has escaped Dr. Birkbeck Hill. 
According to Dr. Messenger Monsey, physician 
of Chelsea Hospital — a rough, Abernethy sort 
of man, whom his admirers compared with Swift 
— upon one occasion, when the age of George 
HI. was under discussion, Johnson burst in 
with a " Pooh ! what does it signify when such 
an animal was born, or whether he had ever 
been born at all?" — an ultra-Jacobital utter- 
ance which the Whig narrator did not neglect to 
accentuate by reminding his hearers that to this 
very " usurper" Johnson subsequently owed his 
pension. But as Monsey did not like the Doc- 
tor, and Taylor calls him a " literary hippopota- 
mus," the incident is probably exaggerated. 
Then there is a story of Dr. Parr, in which is 
concerned another of the Johnson circle, Ed- 
mund Burke. During the Hastings trial Parr 
was effusive (Taylor says " diffusive ") about the 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson,'" 95 

speeches of Sheridan and Fox, but silent as to 
Burke's, a circumstance which led that distin- 
guished orator to suggest interrogatively that he 
presumed Parr found it faultless. "Not so, 
Edmund," was the reply, in Parr's best John- 
sonese ; " your speech was oppressed by epithet, 
dislocated by parenthesis, and debilitated by 
amplification," — a knock-me-down answer to 
which '' Edmund " made no recorded re- 
joinder. There is a touch of the lexicographic 
manner in another anecdote, this time of Hugh 
Kelly, the stay-maker turned dramatist and bar- 
rister, who was so proud of his silver that he 
kept even his spurs upon the sideboard. Ex- 
amining a lady at the trial of George Barring- 
ton, the pick-pocket, Kelly inquired elaborately, 
*' Pray, madam, how could you, in the immensity 
of the crowd, determine the identity of the man ? " 
As he found that his question was wholly unin- 
telligible to the witness, he reduced it to " How 
do you know he was the man.^" " Because," 
came the prompt reply, *' I caught his hand in my 
pocket." Taylor apparently knew both the Bos- 
wells, father and son, and, indeed, playfully claims 
part-authorship in the famous " Life" upon the 
ground that he had suggested the substitution 
of ** comprehending " for "containing" in the 
title-page; and certainly — if that be proof — 



96 Miscellanies. 

" comprehending" is there, and '' containing" is 
not.i He had also relations with Wilkes, whom 
he praises for his wit and learning. For his 
learning we have the evidence of his "Catullus," 
but his wit seems, like much wit of his day, to 
have been largely based upon bad manners. 
Once a certain over-goaded Sir Watkin Lewes 
said angrily to him, "Til be your butt no 
longer." Wilkes at once mercilessly retorted, 
" With all my heart. I never like an empty 
one." 

Wolcot and Caleb Whitefoord of the " Cross 
Readings," Richard Owen Cambridge and Rich- 
ard Cumberland — all figure in the " Records." 
Taylor thinks that the famous Whitefoord addi- 
tion to " Retaliation" was really by Goldsmith 
— a supposition which is not shared by modern 
Goldsmith critics. Of Wolcot there is a lengthy 
account, the most striking part of which refers 
to his last hours. Taylor asked him, on his 
death-bed, whether anything could be done for 
him. " His answer, delivered in a deep and 
strong tone, was, ' Bring back my youth,' " after 
which futile request he fell into the sleep in 
which he died. Cambridge Taylor seems to 
have known but slightly, and apart from a long 

1 For exact title, see/cj/, " Boswell's Predecessors and 
Editors." 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson/' 97 

story, for the authenticity of which he does not 
vouch, has nothing memorable to say of him, 
except that he declared he had written his 
'' Scribleriad " while under the hands of his 
hairdresser, — a piece of fine-gentleman affecta- 
tion which recalls Moli^re's poetaster. But 
Taylor tells a story of Cumberland which is at 
least well invented. Once — so it runs — Cum- 
berland stumbled on entering a box at Drury 
Lane Theatre, and Sheridan sprang to his assist- 
ance. *' Ah, sir I " said the writer of the " V/est 
Indian," " you are the only man to assist a fall- 
ing author." " Rising, you mean," returned 
Sheridan, thus, either by malice or misadventure, 
employing almost the exact words which, in the 
Critic, he had put into the mouth of *' Sir Fret- 
ful Plagiary," — a character admittedly modelled 
upon Cumberland himself. Sheridan, too, sup- 
plies more than one page of these recollections, 
and their writer professes to have been present 
when he (Sheridan) spoke as follows concerning 
a pamphleteer who had written against him : 

"I suppose that Mr. thinks I am angry 

with him, but he is mistaken, for I never har- 
bour resentment. If his punishment depended 
on me, I would show him that the dignity of 
my mind was superior to all vindictive feelings. 
Far should I be from wishing to inflict a capital 
7 



98 Miscellanies. 

punishment upon him, grounded on his attack 
upon me ; but yet on account of his general 
character and conduct, and as a warning to 
others^ I would merely order him to be publicly 
whipped three times, to be placed in the pillory 
four times, to be confined in prison seven years, 
and then, as he would enjoy freedom the more 
after so long a confinement, I would have him 
transported for life." 

At the date of the above deliverance, the 
scene of which was a tavern in Portugal Street, 
— perhaps the now vanished Grange public 
house, — Sheridan was lessee of Drury Lane 
Theatre. In later years Taylor was to become 
acquainted with another Drury Lane magnate. 
Lord Byron, with whom he corresponded and 
exchanged poems. Concerning Lady Byron he 
reports that Mrs. Siddons, whom he regarded 
as an unimpeachable authority, assured him that 
if she had no other reason to admire his Lord- 
ship's judgment and taste, she should be fully 
convinced of both by his choice of a wife, — a 
sentiment which should certainly be set down to 
the credit of a lady who is by no means over- 
praised. Among the Portugal Street roisterers 
was Richard Wilson, the painter. According to 
Taylor he must have been vintner as well, since 
most of the wine came from his cellar in Lin- 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson.'' 99 

coin's Inn Fields (Great Queen Street), the 
company having condemned the tavern bever- 
ages. Apart from the fact that Wilson's " fa- 
vourite fluid," like Churchill's, vv^as porter, this 
particular is more out of keeping with his tra- 
ditional lack of pence than another, also related 
by Taylor, in which he says that, upon one 
occasion, having procured Wilson a commission, 
he was obliged to lend him the money to buy 
brushes and canvas. With artists, however, 
Taylor's acquaintance was not large. He knew 
Peters the academician, afterwards the Rev. ; 
and he knew Ozias Humphry the miniaturist, 
who in his old age became totally blind. With 
West and his rival Opie (who, like Wilson, lived 
in Queen Street) he was apparently on familiar 
terms, and he was often the guest of the former at 
the dinners which the Royal Academy of that day 
were accustomed to have on the anniversary of 
Queen Charlotte's birthday. Of West he speaks 
warmly ; does not mention his vanity, and attrib- 
utes much of his baiting by Peter Pindar to 
that satirist's partiality for Opie. Fuseli, an- 
other resident in Great Queen Street, and 
Northcote, also flit through the record ; and 
there is reference to a supper at Reynolds's, 
where it was idly debated whether Johnson 
would have written the " Reflections on the 



100 Miscellanies. 

French Revolution " better than Burke, and 
where — on the topic De mortuis — Reynolds 
propounded the practical dictum that " the dead 
were nothing, and the living everything," — a 
sentiment which shows him to have been in 
agreement with the On doit des dgards aux 
vivants of Voltaire. But, on the whole, the an- 
nalist's memories of artists are of meagre inter- 
est, and the only compact anecdote related of a 
member of the profession refers to the archi- 
tect known popularly as " Capability" Brown. 
Once when Lord Chatham, disabled by the gout, 
was hobbling painfully down the stairs of St. 
James's Palace, Brown had the good fortune to 
assist him to his carriage. Lord Chatham 
thanked him, adding pleasantly, *' Now, sir, go 
and adorn your country." To which Brown 
the capable retorted neatly, '* Go you, my Lord, 
and save it." 

Of anecdotes of actors and actresses the 
Author of " Monsieur Tonson " has no lack. 
As already stated, he was much in request for 
prologues and epilogues ; he was an active and 
intelligent dramatic critic, and he was, more- 
over, intimate with most of the leading players 
of his day. To make any adequate summary of 
so large a body of theatrical gossip would be 
difficult ; but a few stories may be selected con- 



The Author of ^* Monsieur Tonson.'' loi 

cerning some of the older men. Of Garrick, 
whom Taylor's father had seen when he first 
came out at Goodman's Fields, and regarded as 
the Shakespeare of actors, he tells a number of 
stories which, unfamiliar when the *' Records " 
were published, are now fairly well-known. 
Taylor was, however, the first, we believe, to 
record that effective anecdote of Mrs. Olive, 
who, watching Garrick from behind the scenes, 
between smiles and tears, burst at last into em- 
phatic and audible expression of her belief that 
he could ''act a gridiron;" and Taylor also 
says that once, when his father was performing 
an operation for cataract, Garrick, who was 
present, so enthralled the nervous patient by 
his humour, that he forgot both his fears and 
his pain. Of Garrick's Lady Macbeth, Mrs. 
Pritchard, Taylor, deriving his information from 
his father, speaks highly, and considers that 
Johnson degraded her memory by describing 
her as "an ignorant woman, who talked of her 
gownd/' (Mrs. Pritchard had acted the hero- 
ine in the great man's Irene, and it is possible 
that he was prejudiced.) To Macklin, another 
celebrated Macbeth, — being, indeed, the first 
who performed that part in the old Scottish garb, 
— Taylor makes frequent reference. He saw 
him in lago, in Sir Paul Pliant of the Double 



102 Miscellanies. 

Dealer, and in other characters ; but held that 
he was **too theoretical for nature. He had 
three pauses in his acting — the first, moderate ; 
the second, twice as long ; but his last, or 
* grand pause,' as he styled it, was so long that 
the prompter on one occasion, thinking his 
memory failed, repeated the cue . . . several 
times, and at last so loud as to be heard by the 
audience." Whereupon Macklin in a passion 
rushed from the stage and knocked him down, 
exclaiming, *' The fellow interrupted me in my 
grand pause I " Quin, Macklin's rival, was also 
given to inordinate pauses, and once, while act- 
ing Horatio in Rowe's "Fair Penitent" (the 
play in which George Primrose of Wakefield 
was to have made his d^but), he delayed so long 
to reply to the challenge of Lothario that a man 
in the gallery bawled out, " Why don't you give 
the gentleman an answer, whether you will or 
no?" Taylor cites a good many instances of 
Quin's gourmandise, and of his ready, but rather 
full-flavoured wit. He is perhaps best when on 
his dignity. Once at Allen's of Prior Park 
(Fielding's " Allworthy "), the imperious War- 
burton attempted to degrade the guest into the 
actor by insidiously pressing Quin to recite 
something. Quin accordingly spoke a speech 
from Otway's " Venice Preserved" which con- 
tained the lines, — 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson.'" 103 

*' Honest men 
Are the soft easy cushions on which knaves 
Repose and fatten, " — 

delivering them with so unmistakable an appli- 
cation to Allen and Warburton respectively that 
he was never again troubled by the divine for a 
specimen of his declamatory powers. Another 
story told by Taylor of Quin may be quoted, 
because it introduces Mrs. Clive. She had in- 
vited Quin to stay at Cliveden (Little Straw- 
berry), of which the appointments were on as 
minute a scale as those of Petit-Trianon. When 
he had inspected the garden, she asked him if 
he had noticed a tiny piece of water which she 
called her pond. " Yes, Kate," he replied, " I 
have seen your hazin^ but did not see a wash- 
ball." Taylor seems surprised that Walpole 
should have been so much attracted to Mrs. 
Clive, whose personal charms were small, and 
whose manners, he alleges, were rough and vul- 
gar. He quotes, with apparent approval, some 
unpublished lines by Peter Pindar, criticis- 
ing the epitaph in which Walpole declared that 
Comedy had died with his friend : — 

" Horace, of Strawberry Hill I mean, not Rome, 
Lo ! all thy geese are swans, I do presume ; 
Truth and thy verses seem not to agree ; 



104 Miscellanies. 

Know Comedy is hearty, all alive ; 
The Comic Muse no more expired with Clive 
Than dame Humility will die with thee." 

But one need no more swear to the truth of 
an epitaph than of a song. Catharine Clive had 
both humour and good-humour ; her indefati- 
gable needle was continually employed in the 
decoration of Walpole's Gothic museum, and it 
may be concluded that he knew perfectly what 
he was about. As a near neighbour, a blue 
stocking might have been wearisome, a beauty 
dangerous, and she was probably of far more 
use to him than either. 

Except for the *' gridiron" anecdote, how- 
ever, Mrs. Clive does not play any material part 
in Taylor's chronicle. With a later luminary, 
Miss Farren, he was not actually acquainted, 
although he had met her once with Lord Derby 
(whom she ultimately married), and had admired 
her genuine sensibility in Miss Lee's '^ Chapter 
of Accidents." But he seems to have been on 
intimate terms with Mrs. Abington, both in her 
prime and also in her decline, for he was pres- 
ent when she degraded herself by acting Scrub 
in the '' Beaux' Stratagem ; " ^ and he had dined 
with her at Mrs. Jordan's, when she talked 

1 There is a caricature of Mrs. Abington in this part 
by James Sayer. 



The Author of ^^ Monsieur Tonson.'' 105 

unceasingly and enthusiastically of Garrick, — a 
circumstance which, considering the trouble she 
had given him in his lifetime, may perhaps be 
regarded in the light of an expiatory exercise. 
Taylor also knew Mrs. Siddons, of whom he 
speaks warmly, saying that he had been inti- 
mate with her for years, and had " many of her 
letters, with which even her request would not 
induce him to part." He was, as a matter of 
fact, connected with the Kemble family by mar- 
riage, his first wife, Mrs. Duill, having been a 
Miss Satchell, whose sister had married Stephen 
Kemble, a huge Trulliber of a man who could 
act Falstaff without stuffing, and had gone 
through all the experiences of a strolling player, 
even to lunching in a Yorkshire turnip-field.^ 
Of John Kemble, and Charles Kemble and his 
wife there is much in the " Records," but most 
of it has grown familiar by repetition. There 
is also much of other actors and actresses, as 
might be expected from one who had seen 
Doddas Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Lewis as Mer- 
cutio, "Gentleman" Smith as Charles in the 
''School for Scandal," and Palmer — Lamb's 

1 Stephen George Kemble died in June, 1822. "While 
manager of the Newcastle Theatre, he was on intimate 
terms with Thomas Bewick, who engraved a portrait of 
him as Falstaff for a benefit ticket. 



io6 Miscellanies. 

Jack Palmer — as Sneer in the " Critic." Tay- 
lor's portrait, in the poem called " The Stage," 
of the last-named performer may serve as an 
example of its writer's powers as a rival of 
Lloyd and Churchill : — 

" Where travell'd fops, too nice for nature grown, 
Are sway'd by affectation's whims alone ; 
Where the sly knave, usurping honour's guise, 
By secret villainy attempts to rise ; 
Or where the footman, negligently gay, 
His master's modish airs would fain display; 
But chiefly where the rake, in higher life, 
Cajoles the husband to seduce the wife, 
And, fraught with art, but plausible to sight, 
The libertine and hypocrite unite — 
Palmer from life the faithful portrait draws, 
And calls unrivall'd for our warm applause.'* 

In the foregoing plunges into the Taylorian 
bran-pie, we have, as promised at the outset, 
depended rather upon the writer's personal 
experiences than upon his miscellaneous anec- 
dotes. But we have by no means exhausted 
the personal experiences. Not to mention polit- 
ical magnates like Lord Chatham and Lord 
Chesterfield, whom we have almost entirely 
neglected, there are many references to char- 
acters difficult to classify, but no less diverting 
to recall. As a boy, Taylor had seen Coan, the 
Norfolk dwarf of Churchill's Rosciad 



The Author of ^'Monsieur Tonson.'" 107 

(" Whilst to six feet the vig'rous stripling grown, 
Declares that Garrick is another Coan "), 

then lodging at a tavern in the Five Fields (now 
Eaton Square) kept by one of the Pinchbecks 
who invented the metal of that name ; and he 
remembered the boxer Buckhorse, a debased 
specimen of humanity, whose humour consisted 
in permitting the Eton and Westminster boys 
to punch his battered features at the modest 
rate of a shilling the blow.^ He had also 
visited the famous Mrs. Teresa Cornelys, when 
that favourite of the Nobility and Gentry had 
fallen upon evil days, and was subsisting pre- 
cariously as a purveyor of asses' milk at Knights- 
bridge ; he had known intimately a certain Mr. 
Donaldson, who, like Horace Walpole, had gone 
in danger of his life from the " gentleman high- 
wayman," James Maclean ; and at Angelo's in 
Carlisle Street, Soho, he had frequently met the 
Chevalier D'Eon in his woman's dress, but old, 
and equally decayed in manners and means. It 
is singular that the Author of " Monsieur Ton- 
son," with all his dramatic proclivities, should 

1 Buckhorse can hardly have been familiar with Roman 
law. But twenty-five pieces of copper (about the value 
of a shilling) was the legal tender, or solatium, for a blow 
on the face {cf. the story of Veratius in Gibbon's forty- 
fourth chapter). 



1 08 Miscellanies. 

never have attempted a play. As far as can be 
ascertained, however, his sole contribution to 
stage literature, prologues and epilogues ex- 
cepted, was the lines for the rhyming Butler in 
Mrs. Inchbald's " Lovers' Vows," that version 
of Kotzebue's "Das Kind der Liebe " which 
figures so conspicuously in Miss Austen's 
"Mansfield Park." "Lovers' Vows" would 
appear to be fertile in suggestion, for it was in 
playing this piece that Charles Kean fell in love 
with his future wife, Miss Ellen Tree, sister of 
the musical Maria (Mrs. Bradshaw), who lives 
for ever in Henry Luttrell's happy epigram : — 

" On this Tree when a nightingale settles and sings, 
The Tree will return her as good as she brings." 



BOSWELL'S PREDECESSORS AND 
EDITORS. 

WRITING to Pope in July, 1728, concern- 
ing the annotation of the Dunciad, Swift 
comments upon the prompt oblivion which 
overtakes the minor details of contemporary 
history. *' Twenty miles from London nobody 
understands hints, initial letters, or town facts 
and passages ; and in a few years not even those 
who live in London." A somewhat similar 
opinion was expressed by Johnson. '' In sixty 
or seventy years, or less," he said, '* all works 
which describe manners require notes." His 
own biography is a striking case in point. 
Almost from the beginning the editorial pen 
was freely exercised upon it, and long before 
the lesser term he mentions, it was already — to 
use an expressive phrase of Beaumarchais — 
*' rongde d'extraits et couverte de critiques." With 
Mr. Croker's edition of 183 1 it might have 
been thought that the endurable limits of illus- 
tration and interpretation had been reached, and 
for some time, indeed, that opinion seems to 



no Miscellanies. 

have obtained. But within a comparatively 
brief period three other editions of importance 
have made their appearance, each of which has 
its specific merits, while four and twenty years 
ago was published another (reissued in 1888), 
which had, at least, the merit of an excellent 
plan. Boswell's book itself may now, in Par- 
liamentary language, be taken for " read." As 
Johnson said of Goldsmith's Traveller, " its 
merit is established, and individual praise or 
censure can neither augment nor diminish it." 
But the publication, in Colonel Grant's excel- 
lent brief memoir, of the first systematic bibliog- 
raphy of Johnson's works, coupled with the 
almost simultaneous issue by Mr. H. R. Tedder, 
the able and accomplished librarian to the 
Athenaeum Club, of a bibliography of Boswell's 
masterpiece, affords a sufficient pretext for some 
review of Boswell's editors and predecessors. 

Johnson died on the evening of Monday, 
December 13, 1784. According to a letter 
dated May 5, 1785, from Michael Lort to 
Bishop Percy, printed in Nichols' " Literary 
Illustrations," the first Life appeared on the day 
following the death. But this is a manifest 
mistake, as reference to contemporary news- 
papers, or even to the pamphlet itself, should 
have sufficed to show. At p. 120 is an account 



Bosn^eWs Predecessors and Editors, iii 

of Johnson's funeral, which did not take place 
until Monday, December 20. Moreover, the 
portrait by T. Trotter, for which Johnson is 
said to have sat " some time since," is dated 
the 1 6th, and in an article in the GentlemarCs 
Magazine for December it is expressly stated 
that the book ''was announced before the 
Doctor had been two days dead," and appeared 
on the ninth morning after his death. It may 
even be doubtful if this is strictly accurate, as 
the first notification of the pamphlet in the Pub- 
lic Advertiser appears on Thursday, the 23rd, 
and promises its publication that week. Its 
title is "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 
with Occasional Remarks on his Writings, an 
Authentic Copy of his Will, and a Catalogue 
of his Works, &c.," 1785. It is an octavo of iv- 
144 pages, and its publisher was the G. Kears- 
ley, of 46 Fleet Street, who issued so many of 
Goldsmith's works. Its author, too, is sup- 
posed to have been the William Cook who 
subsequently wrote recollections of Goldsmith 
in the European Magazine for 1793. In Kears- 
ley's advertisement great pains are taken to 
avert the possible charge of catchpenny haste, 
by the statement that the book had been drawn 
up for some time, but had been withheld from 
motives of delicacy. This anticipatory defence 



112 Miscellanies. 

is, hov/ever, somewhat neutralized by a com- 
munication in the Gentlemans Magazine for 
December, in which certain of its errors are 
excused upon the ground of " hurry." It 
professes, nevertheless, to be " a sketch, warm 
from the life," and, although speedily superseded 
by more leisurely efforts, is certainly not with- 
out interest as the earliest of its kind, even if 
it be not quite so early as it has hitherto been 
affirmed to be. 

Cook's Life was followed by articles in the 
European and the Gentleman's Magazines for 
December, which, according to the fashion of 
those days, appeared at the end and not at the 
beginning of the month. That in the European 
Maga:{ine, which was more critical than bio- 
graphical, was continued through several num- 
bers, and contains nothing to distinguish it from 
the respectable and laborious journey-work of the 
period. The sketch in the Gentleman's Maga- 
:{ine is of a far more meritorious character, and 
was from the pen of Tom Tyers, the ''Tom 
Restless" of the Idler, and the son of Jon- 
athan, " the founder of that excellent place of 
publick amusement, Vauxhall Gardens." Tyers 
had really known Johnson with a certain degree 
of intimacy, and even Boswell is obliged to 
admit that Tyers lived with his illustrious friend 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 113 

'Mn as easy a manner as almost any of his very 
numerous acquaintance." He has certainly not 
caught Johnson's style, as his memories are 
couched in abrupt shorthand sentences which 
are the reverse of Johnsonese. But apart from 
a certain vanity of classical quotation, with which 
he seems to have been twitted by his contempo- 
raries, " Tom Restless "writes like a gentleman, 
and is fully entitled to the praise of having pro- 
duced the first animated sketch of Johnson, who, 
from a sentence towards the close, appears to 
have anticipated that Tyers might be one day 
" called upon to assist a posthumous account of 
him." Mr. Napier says that Tyers continued 
his sketch in the Gentleman's Magazine for Jan- 
uary, 1785. This is not quite exact, and is in- 
deed practically contradicted by Mrs. Napier, 
since in the valuable volume of " Johnsoniana" 
which accompanies her husband's edition, she 
prints no more than is to be found in the 
December number. What Tyers really did 
was to insert a number of minor corrections in 
the annual supplement to the Gentleman's Mag- 
azine, and in the following number. 

Without a close examination of contemporary 
advertisement sheets it would be difficult to fix 
precisely the date of publication of the next 
biography. It is a small duodecimo of 197 



114 Miscellanies. 

pages, entitled " Memoirs of the Life and Writ- 
ings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson." The 
title-page is dated 1785. In the Preface men- 
tion is made of assistance rendered by Thomas 
Davies, the actor-bookseller of Russell Street, 
Covent Garden, who is described as "the late." 
The book must therefore have appeared after 
Thursday, May 5, when Davies died. Its author 
is supposed to have been the Rev. William Shaw, 
"a modest and a decent man," referred to in 
Boswell as the compiler of "an Erse Grammar," 
subsequently issued in 1788 as "An Analysis of 
the Gaelic Language." Colour is given to this 
supposition by the fact that another of the per- 
sons who supplied information was Mr. Elphin- 
ston, by whom Shaw was introduced to Johnson, 
and by the references made to the Ossianic con- 
troversy, in which Shaw did battle on Johnson's 
side against Macpherson. For the book itself, 
it is, like most of the pre-Boswellian efforts, 
Tyers's sketch excepted, mainly critical, and 
makes no attempt to reproduce Johnson's talk 
or sayings. 

Chit-chat and personal characteristics are, 
however, somewhat more fully represented in 
what — neglecting for the moment Boswell's 
"Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" — may 
be regarded as the next effort in the biographi- 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 115 

cal sequence, the famous " Anecdotes of the 
Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last 
Twenty Years of his Life," by Hesther Lynch 
Piozzi, which was published in March, 1786. 
Written in Italy, where she was then living, it 
was printed in London. Its success, as might 
perhaps have been anticipated from the author's 
long connection with Johnson, was exceptional. 
The first edition, like that of Fielding's '^Amelia," 
was exhausted on the day of publication, and 
other editions followed rapidly. Boswell, as may 
be guessed, was not well disposed towards the 
work of his fortunate rival, and in his own book 
is at considerable pains to expose her '^mistaken 
notion of Dr. Johnson's character," while his 
coadjutor, Malone, who tells us that she made 
;^5oo by the '' Anecdotes," plainly calls her 
both "inaccurate and artful." We, who are 
neither editors nor biographers of Boswell, need 
not assume so censorious an attitude. That 
Mrs. Piozzi, by habit of mind, and from the 
circumstances under which her narrative was 
compiled, was negligent in her facts (she even 
blunders as to the date when she first met 
Johnson) may be admitted, and it is not in- 
conceivable that, as Mrs. Napier says in the 
^' Prefatory Notice" to her " Johnsoniana," her 
account would have been ^' more tender and 



ii6 Miscellanies. 

true if it had been given by Mrs. Thrale instead 
of Mrs. Piozzi." But the cumulative effect of 
her vivacious and disconnected recollections 
(even Malone admits them to be "lively") is 
rather corroborative of, than at variance with, 
that produced by Johnson's more serious biogra- 
phers. Her opportunities were great, — perhaps 
greater than those of any of her contemporaries, 
— her intercourse with Johnson was most un- 
restrained and unconventional, and notwith- 
standing all its faults, her little volume remains 
an essential part of Johnsonian literature. 

Boswell, whose magnum opus we are now 
approaching, so fills the foreground with his 
fame that the partial obliteration of his prede- 
cessors is almost a necessary consequence. In 
this way Sir John Hawkins, whose *' Life of 
Samuel Johnson, LL.D.," 1787, comes next in 
importance to Mrs. Piozzi's " Anecdotes," has 
suffered considerably ; and his book, which im- 
mediately after Johnson's death was advertised 
as " forthcoming," is, to use the words of a re- 
cent writer, " spoken of with contempt by many 
who have never taken the trouble to do more 
than turn over its leaves." That the author 
seems to have been extremely unpopular can 
scarcely be denied. Malone, who accumulates 
a page of his characteristics, says that Percy 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 117 

called him ''most detestable," Reynolds, ''ab- 
solutely dishonest," and Dyer, " mischievous, 
uncharitable, and malignant," to which garland 
of dispraise the recorder adds, as his own con- 
tribution, that he was ^^ rigid and sanctimonious." 
Johnson, too, styled him "an unclubable man." 
But against all this censure it must be remem- 
bered that he was selected as one of the first 
members of " The Club " (to whose promoters 
his peculiarities can scarcely have been unknown, 
for he had belonged to the earlier association 
in Ivy Lane), and that Johnson appointed him 
one of his executors. Boswell, whose vanity 
Hawkins had wounded by the slight and 
supercilious way in which he spoke of him in 
the " Life," could scarcely be supposed to feel 
kindly to him ; and though he professes to have 
modified what he said of this particular rival on 
account of his death, we have no means of 
knowing how much he suppressed. He gives, 
nevertheless, what on the whole is a not unfair 
idea of Hawkins's volume. '^ However inade- 
quate and improper," he says, "as a Life of Dr. 
Johnson, and however discredited by unpardon- 
able inaccuracies in other respects, [it] contains 
a collection of curious anecdotes and observa- 
tions which few men but its authour could have 
brought together." What is commendatory in 



1 1 8 Miscellanies. 

this verdict is not exaggerated, and those who 
care enough for Johnson to travel beyond Bos- 
well will certainly find Hawkins by no means 
so " ponderous " as Boswell would have us to 
believe. Many of the particulars he gives are 
certainly not to be found elsewhere, and his 
knowledge of the seamy side of letters in Geor- 
gian London was " extensive and peculiar." 

To speak of Hawkins after Mrs. Piozzi is a 
course more convenient than chronological, as 
it involves the neglect of an intermediate biogra- 
pher. But the " Essay on the Life, Character, 
and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson," from the 
pen of the Rev. Joseph Towers, which comes 
between them in 1786, has no serious import. 
It treats more of the writings than the character 
and life, and, except as the respectable effort 
of an educated man, need not detain us from 
Boswell himself, whose first offering at the 
shrine of his adoration was made in September, 
1785, when he published the ''Journal of a 
Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, 
LL.D." The tour, of which Johnson had him- 
self given an account in his "Journey to the 
Western Islands of Scotland," had taken place 
as far back as 1773, and Boswell's journal had 
lain by him ever since. But the manuscript had 
been lent to different persons, — to Mrs. Thrale 



BoswelVs Predecessors and Editors. 119 

among the rest. " I am glad you read Boswell's 
journal," said Johnson to her; '^you are now 
sufficiently informed of the whole transaction, 
and need not regret that you did not make the 
tour to the Hebrides." A more emphatic tes- 
timony is contained in the "Journal" itself. 
Johnson, we are told, perused it diligently from 
day to day, and declared that he took great 
delight in doing so. " It might be printed," he 
said, "were the subject fit for printing," and 
further on he forbade Boswell to contract it. 
In his dedication to Malone, whose acquaint- 
ance he made in Baldwin's printing office while 
correcting the proofs, Boswell showed that he 
was conscious of the strong point of his work, 
"the numerous conversations, which (he said) 
form the most valuable part." In the third edi- 
tion, dated August, 1786, the success of the 
book justified an ampler note of gratification : 
" I will venture to predict, that this specimen 
of the colloquial talents and extemporaneous 
effusions of my illustrious fellow-traveller will 
become still more valuable, when, by the lapse 
of time, he shall have become an Ancient ; when 
all those who can now bear testimony to the 
transcendent powers of his mind shall have 
passed away ; and no other memorial of this 
great and good man shall remain but the follow- 



120 Miscellanies. 

ing Journal, the other anecdotes and letters 
preserved by his friends, and those incompar- 
able works, which have for many years been 
in the highest estimation, and will be read and 
admired as long as the English language shall 
be spoken or understood." Whether this varia- 
tion of Exegi monumenium is justifiable or not — 
and certainly some of the "incomparable works," 
have but faintly fulfilled their promise of perpe- 
tuity — BoswelFs accentuation of his distinctive 
excellence, his admirably characteristic records 
of conversations, is unanswerable evidence of a 
settled purpose and a definite aim. 

On a fly-leaf of the " Tour to the Hebrides " 
(not as Mr. Napier seems to suppose, confined 
to the third edition) was announced as "prepar- 
ing for the press " the greater work by which 
the "Tour" was succeeded in 179 1. At first 
it was to have been comprised in one quarto 
volume, but it ultimately made its appearance in 
two. The publisher was Charles Dilly, in the 
Poultry, and the title-page ran as follows : — 

'^The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., com- 
prehending an Account of his Studies and numer- 
ous Works, in chronological Order ; a Series of 
his Epistolary Correspondence and Conversa- 
tions with many eminent Persons ; and various 
original Pieces of his Composition, never be- 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors, 121 

fore published. The whole exhibiting a "View 
of Literature and Literary Men in Great-Brit- 
ain, for near half a Century, during which he 
flourished." 

In the dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
referring to the earlier book, Boswell dwells 
upon a difference of treatment which distinguishes 
the *'Life" from its predecessor. In the 
" Tour" he had, it seems, been too open in his 
communications, freely exhibiting to the world 
the dexterity of Johnson's wit, even when that 
wit was exercised upon himself. His frankness 
had in some quarters been mistaken for insensi- 
bility, and he has therefore in the " Life" been 
*' more reserved," and though he tells nothing 
but the truth, has still kept in his ntind that the 
whole truth is not always to be exposed. In 
the Advertisement which succeeds he enlarges 
upon the difficulties of his task, and the labour 
involved in the arrangement and collection of 
material ; and he expresses his obligations to 
Malone, who had heard nearly all the book in 
manuscript, and had revised about half of it in 
type. Seventeen hundred copies of it were 
printed, and although the price in boards was 
two guineas, between May (when the book 
appeared) and August twelve hundred of these 
had been sold. Boswell, who gives this infor- 



122 Miscellanies. 

mation to his friend Temple, in a letter dated 
the 22nd of the latter month, expected that the 
entire impression would be disposed of before 
Christmas. 

This hope, however, does not appear to have 
been realised, since the second edition in three 
volumes octavo, considerably revised, and in- 
cluding "eight sheets of additional matter," was 
not published until July, 1793. During the 
progress of the work through the press many 
additional letters and anecdotes had come to 
hand, which were inserted in an introduction 
and appendix. These numerous improvements 
were at the same time printed in quarto form for 
the benefit of the purchasers of the issue of 1791, 
and sold at half-a-crown, under the title of ^'The 
Principal Corrections and Additions to the First 
Edition of Mr. Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson." 
As in the " Tour to the Hebrides," the success 
of his labours inspired their author with a greater 
exultation of prefatory language. Referring to 
the death of Reynolds, which had taken place 
in the interval between the first and second 
editions, he says that Sir Joshua had read the 
book, and given '• the strongest testimony to its 
fidelity." He has Johnsonised the land, he says 
farther on, and he trusts " they will not only 
talk but think Johnson." 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 123 

He was still busily amending and retouching 
for a third edition when he died, on May 
19, 1795, at his house, then No. 47, but now 
(or recently) No. 122, Great Portland Street. 
His task was taken up by Malone, who had 
been his adviser from the first, and under 
Malone's superintendence was issued, " revised 
and augmented," the third edition of 1799. 
From the fact that it contains BoswelFs latest 
touches, this edition is held to be the most de- 
sirable by Johnson students. Bosweil's friends 
contributed several notes, some of which were 
the work of the author's second son, James, 
then a student at Brasenose College, Oxford. 
Fourth, fifth, and sixth editions followed, all 
under the editorship of Malone. Then, shortly 
after the publication in 181 1 of the last of these, 
Malone himself died. Seventh, eighth, and 
ninth editions, all avowedly or unavowedly 
reproducing Malone's last issue, subsequently 
appeared, the ninth having some additions by 
Alexander Chalmers. Then came what is known 
as the '^ Oxford" edition, by F. P. Walesby, of 
Wadham College, which contained some fresh 
recollections of Johnson and some stray particu- 
lars as to Boswell, whose portrait, for the first 
time, is added. A tiny issue in one volume, 
small octavo, beautifully printed in double col- 



1 24 Miscellanies. 

umns at the Chiswick Press, is the only one 
that needs mention previous to the historical 
edition by the Right Honourable John Wilson 
Croker, published in 183 1. 

As will be seen, the foregoing paragraphs 
deal more with Johnson's earlier biographers 
than with the main subject of this paper. Bos- 
well's editors. But the earlier biographers are, 
if not the chief, at least no inconsiderable part 
of the material employed by those editors, and 
by none more conspicuously, more ably, and at 
the same time more unhappily, than by the one 
whose labours attracted the censure of Macaulay 
and Carlyle. What is most distinctive in Bos- 
well is Boswell's method and Boswell's manner. 
Long before, Johnson had touched upon this 
personal quality when writing of the Corsican 
tour. " Your History," he said, " is like other 
histories, but your Journal is in a very high 
degree curious and delightful. . . . Your His- 
tory was copied from books ; your Journal rose 
out of your own experience and observation. 
You express images which operated strongly 
upon yourself, and you have impressed them 
with great force upon your readers." From 
less friendly critics the verdict was the same. 
Walpole, though caustic and flippant, speaks to 
like purport ; and Gray, who has been " pleased 



BoswelVs Predecessors and Editors. 12$ 

and moved strangely," declares it proves what 
he has always maintained, "that any fool may 
write a most valuable book by chance, if he 
will only tell us what he heard and saw with 
veracity." This faculty of communicating his 
impressions accurately to his reader is BoswelFs 
most conspicuous gift. Present in his first 
book, it was more present in his second, and 
when he began his great biography it had 
reached its highest point. So individual is his 
manner, so unique his method of collecting and 
arranging his information, that to disturb the 
native character of his narrative by interpolating 
foreign material, must of necessity impair its 
specific character and imperil its personal note. 
Yet, by some strange freak of fate, this was just 
the very treatment to which it was subjected. 

From the very outset indeed, it would seem, 
his text was considerably " edited." Boswell, 
like many writers of his temperament, was fond 
of stimulating his flagging invention by miscella- 
neous advice, and it is plain from the comparison 
of his finished work with his rough notes, that 
in order to make his anecdotes more direct and 
effective he freely manipulated his reminiscences. 
But it is quite probable — and this is a point 
that we do not remember to have seen touched 
on — that much of the trimming which his 



126 Miscellanies. 

records received is attributable to Malone. At 
all events, when Malone took up the editing 
after Boswell's death, he is known to have 
made many minor alterations in the process of 
"settling the text," and it is only reasonable to 
suppose that he had done the same thing in the 
author's lifetime, a supposition which would ac- 
count for some at least of the variations which 
have been observed between Boswell's anec- 
dotes in their earliest and their latest forms. 
But the admitted alterations of Malone were 
but trifles compared with the extraordinary re- 
adjustment which the book, as Malone left it, 
received at the hands of Mr. Croker. Not con- 
tent with working freely upon the text itself — 
compressing, omitting, transposing, as seemed 
good in his eyes — by a process almost incon- 
ceivable in a critic and litterateur of admitted 
experience, he liberally interlarded it with long 
extracts and letters from Hawkins, Piozzi, Cum- 
berland, Murphy, and others of Boswell's prede- 
cessors and successors, and so turned into an 
irregular patchwork what the author had left a 
continuous and methodical design. Further- 
more he incorporated with it, among other 
things, under its date of occurrence, the separate 
volume of the "Tour to the Hebrides," having 
first polled and trimmed that work according to 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 127 

his taste and fancy. Finally, he added — and 
this is the least questionable of his acts — an 
inordinate number of footnotes. Many of these, 
it must be conceded, are of the highest value. 
Penned at a time when memories of Johnson 
and his contemporaries were still fresh in men's 
minds, and collected by a writer whose industry 
and curiosity were as exceptional as his equip- 
ment and opportunities, they must always re- 
main an inestimable magazine of Johnsoniana. 
Their worst fault is that they are more a ware- 
house than a treasury, and that they exhibit less 
of literary resource than literary incontinence. 

But if the intrinsic worth of Croker's volumi- 
nous annotations has survived the verbal artillery 
of Macaulay and Carlyle, it has luckily been 
otherwise with his remodelling of BoswelFs 
text, the principles of which were virtually 
abandoned in the second edition of 1835. U^' 
fortunately, the execution of this concession to 
popular opinion was only partial. Although the 
majority of the passages added to the text were 
rearranged as foot-notes or distributed into ap- 
pendices, the Scotch "tour" still upreared it- 
self in the midst as a huge stumbling-block, 
while the journey ,to Wales and the letters of 
Johnson and Mrs. Thrale were retained. In 
1847, when Mr. Croker prepared his definite 



x 



1 28 Miscellanies. 

edition, he continued impenitent to this extent, 
although he speaks in his "Advertisement" of 
abridgment and alteration. Nay, he even ac- 
quiesced in the perpetuation of another enor- 
mity which dates from the edition of 1835 (an 
edition which he only partly superintended), the 
breaking up of the book into chapters. This 
was a violation of Boswell's plan which it is 
impossible to describe except as an act of Van- 
dalism. " Divisions into books and chapters," 
says Mr. Napier, unanswerably (if somewhat 
grandiloquently), *' are, as it were, articulations 
in the organic whole of a literary composition ; 
and this special form cannot be super-induced 
merely externally." Yet, all these drawbacks 
to the contrary^ Mr. Croker's edition enjoyed 
a long popularity, and the edition just referred 
to was reprinted as late as 1876. 

It would be beyond our province to trace the 
post-Crokerian issues of BoswelFs book, which, 
with the exception of an illustrated edition un- 
der the superintendence of Dr. Robert Car- 
ruthers, author of the life of Pope, were mainly 
reprints of Malone. But from what has gone 
before, it will be surmised that the presentation, 
as far as practicable, of Boswell's unsophisti- 
cated text must sooner or later become the 
ambition of the modern editor. In this praise- 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 129 

worthy enterprise the pioneer appears to have 
been Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. In May, 1874, 
acting with the encouragement and countenance 
of Carlyle, to whom his work was dedicated, 
he published with Messrs. Bickers an edition of 
Boswell's "Life" in three volumes, of which 
the object was to exhibit Boswell's text in its 
first published form, and at the same time to 
show the alterations made or contemplated by 
him in the two subsequent editions with which 
he was concerned. Thus the reader was en- 
abled to follow the process of revision in the 
author's mind, and to derive additional satis- 
faction from the spectacle of the naif and highly 
ingenuous motives which prompted many of 
Boswell's rectifications and re-adjustments. As 
was inevitable in such a plan, the "tour to the 
Hebrides" was placed by itself at the end, an 
arrangement which had also been followed by 
Carruthers ; the " Diary of a Tour in Wales," 
which Mr. Croker had turned into chap. xlvi. 
of his compilation, disappeared altogether ; and 
the interpolated letters knew their place no 
more. The division into chapters also vanished 
with the restoration of the original text, which, 
together with Boswell's spelling, punctuation, 
paragraphs, and other special characteristics, 
were religiously preserved. By this arrange- 
9 



130 Miscellanies. 

ment, taken in connection with the foot-notes 
exhibiting the variations, the reader was placed 
in the position of a person having before him 
at one view the editions of 1791, 1793, and 
1799, as well as the separate " Corrections and 
Additions'' issued by Boswell in 1793. Mr. 
Fitzgerald also appended certain notes of his 
own ; but, wherever they occurred on the same 
page as Boswell's work, carefully fenced them 
off by a line of demarcation from what was 
legitimate Boswell. Upon these notes, gener- 
ally brief and apposite, it is not necessary to 
dwell. The noticeable characteristic of Mr. 
Fitzgerald's edition is its loyalty to Boswell, 
and for that, if for that only, the lovers of John- 
son owe him a deep debt of gratitude.^ 

In 1880, six years after the first appearance 
of the above edition of Boswell's " Life/' Mr. 
Fitzgerald published, under the title of " Crok- 
er's Boswell and Boswell," a volume which was 
apparently the outcome of his earlier labours 
in this field. With the first part of this, which 
treats mainly of the feud between Macaulay 
and Croker, and the peculiarities and defects 

1 Mr. Fitzgerald's edition of Boswell was re-issued in 
1888, with a new and interesting preface, to which was 
added the valuable Bibliography by Mr. H. R. Tedder, 
referred to at the beginning of this paper. 



BosweWs Predecessors and Editors. 131 

of the latter as an editor, we have no imme- 
diate concern. But the second part, which 
exhibits Boswell at his work, collects much 
valuable information with respect to his method 
of note-making, and, with the assistance of the 
curious memoranda belonging to the late Lord 
Houghton, published in 1874 by the Grampian 
Club under the title of " Boswelliana," shows 
how much judicious correction and adroit com- 
pression went to produce these " literary and 
characteristical anecdotes . . . told with au- 
thenticity, and in a lively manner," which, as 
Boswell explained to his friend Temple, were to 
form the staple of his work. Other chapters 
of equal interest deal with BoswelFs strange 
antipathies and second thoughts, both of which 
themes, and the former especially, are of no 
small importance to the minute student of his 
labours. We have mentioned this book of Mr. 
Fitzgerald's, because, among the many pro- 
ductions of his indefatigable pen, it is the one 
which has always interested us most, and it is 
obviously, as he declares in his preface, written 
con amore. 

That the reproduction of Boswell neat — to 
use a convenient vulgarism — had attracted 
closer attention to the defects of Croker's con- 
coction may be fairly assumed, and the volume 



132 'Miscellanies. 

just mentioned probably, and certainly among 
specialists, enforced this impression. Accord- 
ingly, in 1884, a new edition of the '* Life," 
upon which the editor, the late Rev. Alexander 
Napier, vicar of Holkham, had been engaged 
for many years, was issued by Messrs. George 
Bell and Sons. It was illustrated by facsimiles, 
steel engravings and portraits, and was received 
with considerable, and even, in some quarters, 
exaggerated, enthusiasm. In this edition the 
arrangement of Boswell's text was strictly fol- 
lowed, and the tours in Wales and Scotland 
were printed separately. Many of Croker's 
notes were withdrawn or abridged, and Mr. 
Napier, in pursuance of a theory, which is as 
sound as it is unusual, also omitted all those in 
which his predecessor had considered it his 
duty "to act as censor on Boswell " and even 
on Johnson himself. The editor's duty, said 
Mr. Napier, " is to subordinate himself to his 
author, and admit that only which elucidates his 
author's meaning. ... It cannot be the duty 
of an editor to insult the writer whose book he 
edits. I confess that the notes of Mr. Croker 
which most offend are those in which, not sel- 
dom, he delights — let me be allowed to use a 
familiar colloquialism — to snub ' Mr. Boswell.'" 
In this deliverance no reasonable reader can fail 



BosjvelVs Predecessors and Editors. 133 

to concur. Besides the editing of Croker, how- 
ever, Mr. Napier added many useful notes of 
his own, as well as some very interesting ap- 
pendices. One of these reproduces the auto- 
biographical sketch of Johnson prefixed by 
Richard Wright of Lichfield, in 1805, to Miss 
Hill Boothby's letters ; another deals with that 
mysterious "History of Prince Titi " which 
figures in Macaulay's review of Croker's first 
edition ; a third successfully dissipates the leg- 
endary account of a meeting betv/een Ursa 
Major and Adam Smith, which represents those 
'^ grave and reverend seignors " as engaged in 
competitive Billingsgate. " Carleton's Me- 
moirs," Theophilus Gibber's '* Lives of the 
Poets," and the daughters of Mauritius Lowe 
are also treated of in this, the newest part of 
Mr. Napier's labours. 

But his edition also includes a valuable supple- 
ment in the shape of a volume of ** Johnsoniana," 
collected and edited by Mrs. Napier, whose 
praiseworthy plan is to avoid merely fragmentary 
" sayings " and "anecdotes," and, as far as pos- 
sible, to give only complete articles. Thus 
Mrs. Napier opens with Mrs. Piozzi's book, and 
then goes on to reprint Hawkins' collection of 
apophthegms, the Hill Boothby correspondence, 
Tyers' sketch from the Gentleman's Magazine, 



134 Miscellanies. 

the essay published by Arthur Murphy in 1792 
for his edition of Johnson's works, and various 
recollections and so forth collected from Rey- 
nolds, Cumberland, Madame D'Arblay, Hannah 
More, Percy, and others. But her freshest 
trouvaille is the diary of a certain Dr. Thomas 
Campbell, an Irishman who visited England in 
1775, ^"<^' after the fashion of the time, recorded 
his impressions. This diary has a curious his- 
tory. Carried to Australia by some of its writer's 
descendants, it was peaceably travelling towards 
dissolution when it was unearthed behind an old 
press in one of the offices of the Supreme Court 
of New South Wales. In 18^4 it was published 
at Sydney by Mr. Samuel Raymond, and from 
that date until 1884 does not seem to have been 
reprinted in England. Dr. Campbell had some 
repute as an historian, and it was he who pre- 
pared for Percy the memoir of Goldsmith which, 
in 1837, was in the possession of Mr. Prior, and 
formed the first sketch for the straggling com- 
pilation afterwards prefixed to the well-known 
edition of Goldsmith's works dated 1801. 
Campbell's avowed object in coming to London 
was to '' see the lions," and his notes are suf- 
ficiently amusing. He lodged at the Grecian 
Coffee House, and at the Hummums in Covent 
Garden, where once appeared the ghost of 



BostveWs Predecessors and Editors. 135 
Johnson's dissolute relative, Parson Ford, the 

" fortem validumque combibonem 
Laetantem super amphora repleta " 

of Vincent Bourne's hendecasyllabics ; he saw- 
Woodward in Hoadly's "Suspicious Husband," 
and Garrick as Lusignan and Lear, in which 
latter character Dr. Campbell, contradicting all 
received tradition, considered ^' he could not 
display himself." He went to the auction-rooms 
in the Piazza ; he went to the Foundling and 
the Temple and Dr. Dodd's Chapel ; he went to 
Ranelagh and the Pantheon, where he watched 
those lapsed lovers. Lady Grosvenor and the 
Duke of Cumberland, carefully avoiding each 
other. He dined often at Thrale's, meeting 
Boswell and Baretti, and Murphy and Johnson. 
With the great man he was not impressed, and 
his portrait affords an example of Johnson as he 
struck an unsympathetic contemporary. Accord- 
ing to Dr. Campbell this was his picture : — 
*' He has the aspect of an Idiot, without the 
faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one 
feature — with the most awkward garb, and un- 
powdered grey wig, on one side only of his 
head — he is for ever dancing the devil's jig, and 
sometimes he makes the most driveling effort to 
whistle some thought in his absent paroxisms. 



136 Miscellanies. 

He came up to me and took me by the hand, 
then sat down upon a sofa, and mumbled out 
that ' he had heard two papers had appeared 
against him in the course of this week — one of 
which was — that he was to go to Ireland next 
summer in order to abuse the hospitality of that 
place also [a reference to the recently published 
^' Journey to the Western Islands " ].' His awk- 
wardness at table is just what Chesterfield de- 
scribed, and his roughness of manners kept pace 
with that. When Mrs. Thrale quoted something 
from Foster's ' Sermons ' he flew in a passion, 
and said that Foster was a man of mean ability, 
and of no original thinking. All which tho' I 
took to be most true, yet I held it not meet 
to have it so set down." From this it will be 
perceived that Dr. Campbell was of those who 
identified the "respectable Hottentot" of 
Chesterfield's letters with the "great Lexicog- 
rapher," an identification which Dr. Birkbeck 
Hill, in "Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His 
Critics," has successfully shown to be untenable. 
Towards the close of 1884 Mr. Napier's 
edition was reissued in the " Standard Library," 
making six small volumes, in which some only of 
the portrait illustrations of the first issue were 
reproduced. The chief addition consisted of a 
series of seven letters from Boswell to his friend 



BosjvelVs Predecessors and Editors. 137 

Sir David Dalrymple. Extracts from this very 
interesting correspondence, bearing upon Bos- 
well's first acquaintance v^^ith his Mentor, had 
appeared in the volume of "Boswelliana" 
already mentioned, but they had been but ex- 
tracts. Mr. Napier gave the letters in. extenso. 
Two years later Professor Henry Morley pub- 
lished, in five exceedingly handsome volumes, 
what, from the fact of its decoration by portraits 
from the brush of Sir Joshua, he christened the 
** Reynolds" edition. In common with all Pro- 
fessor Morley's work, the editing of this issue 
was thoroughly straightforward and sensible. 
A new and noticeable feature was the prefixing 
to each of the prefaces of the different editors 
a succinct account of the writer. At the end 
came an essay entitled the " Spirit of Johnson," 
to which can scarcely be denied the merit 
claimed for it by a competent critic of being " one 
of the best descriptions of Johnson's character 
that has ever been written." There were also 
elaborate indices, of which one can only say in 
their dispraise that they were less elaborate than 
that prepared by the editor who follows Pro- 
fessor Morlev. Like Mr. Napier, Mr. Morley 
was largely indebted to Croker, and like Mr. 
Napier he freely pruned his predecessor's 
luxuriance. 



138 Miscellanies. 

Colonel Francis Grant's excellent little me- 
moir in the "Great Writers" series deserves 
mention, because, although exceedingly unpre- 
tentious, it is the work of one who, to borrow 
Boswell's epithet for Malone, is certainly 
" Johnsonianissimus." It is impossible to turn 
his anecdotical pages without seeing that he is 
steeped in the literature of the period, and that, 
for him, the personages of the Boswellian drama 
have all the reality of living friends. His 
volume, too, includes a valuable bibliography by 
Mr. John P. Anderson of Johnson's works, 
which, in point of time, preceded the special 
bibliography of Boswell's " Life " in Mr. Fitz- 
gerald's reprint. And this brings us to the last 
work on our list, the sumptuous edition by Dr. 
George Birkbeck Hill, issued in 1887 from the 
Clarendon Press, a work which was received 
with an almost universal chorus of praise. 

That Dr. Birkbeck Hill's book is " unlivre de 
bonne foi,'' there can indeed be little doubt. He is 
well known as a devoted worshipper at Johnson's 
shrine. He has been for years a persistent re- 
viewer of books on this subject (especially Mr. 
Fitzgerald's), and his essays (collected in 1878 
from the Cornhill and other periodicals under 
the title of "Dr. Johnson: His Friends and 
His Critics"), bear that unmistakable stamp 



BoswelVs Predecessors and Editors. 139 

which denotes the writer who has not crammed 
his subject for the purpose of preparing an arti- 
cle, but wKo has, so to speak, let the article 
write itself out of the fulness of his resources. 
Besides these he edited, in 1879, BoswelFs 
" Journal of a Tour to Corsica " and his corres- 
pondence with Andrew Erskine. But he has 
crowned his former labours by this sumptuous 
edition with its excellent typography, its hand- 
some page, and its exhaustive index, which last, 
we can well believe, must have cost him, as he 
says, ''many months' heavy work." That he 
himself executed this "sublunary task," as a 
recent writer has described it, is matter for con- 
gratulation ; that he has also verified it page by 
page in proof almost entitles him to a Montyon 
prize for exceptional literary virtue. Our only 
regret is that his '* Preface" is touched a little 
too strongly with the sense of his unquestioned 
industry and conscientiousness. However legiti- 
mate it may be, the public is always somewhat 
impatient of the superbia qucesita meritis. More- 
over, it is an extremely difficult thing to display 
judiciously, and, after all, as Carlyle said of 
Croker's attempt, the editing of Boswell is " a 
praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure." 

This note of self-gratulation in Dr. Birkbeck 
Hill's introductory words is, however, but a 



140 Miscellanies, 

trifling drawback when contrasted with the real 
merits of a work which, in these days of piping- 
hot publication, has much of the leisurely grace 
of eighteenth-century scholarship. The labour 
— not only the labour of which the result re- 
mains on record, but that bloomless and fruitless 
labour with which everyone who has been en- 
gaged in editorial drudgery can sympathise — 
must have been unprecedented. Nothing could 
be more ungracious than to smear the petty blot 
of an occasional inaccuracy across the wide field 
which has been explored so observantly — cer- 
tainly it could not be the desire of those who 
have ever experienced the multiplied chances of 
error involved by transcription, press-correction, 
revision, and re-revision. At the same time we 
frankly own that we think Dr. Birkbeck Hill's 
edition has not escaped a dangerous defect of its 
qualities. It unquestionably errs on the side of 
excess. " I have sought," he says, "to follow 
him [Johnson] wherever a remark of his re- 
quired illustration, and have read through many 
a book that I might trace to its source a refer- 
ence or an allusion." And he has no doubt 
been frequently very fortunate, notably in his 
identification of the quotation which Johnson 
made when he heard the Highland girl of Nairne 
singing at her spinning-wheel, in his solution of 



BoswelVs Predecessors and Editors. 141 

" loploUy," and in half a dozen similar cases. 
But, as regards " remarlis that require illustra- 
tion/' there are manifestly two methods, the 
moderate and the immoderate. By the one 
nothing but such reference or elucidation as ex- 
plains the text is admissible ; by the other any- 
thing that can possibly be connected with it is 
drawn into its train, and the motley notes tread 
upon each other's heels much as, in the fairy tale, 
the three girls, the parson, and the sexton follow 
the fallow with the golden goose. To the latter 
of these methods rather than the former Dr. 
Birkbeck Hill " seriously inclines," and almost 
any portion of his book would serve to supply 
a case in point. Take, for instance, the note at 
page 269, vol. i., to the verse which Boswell 
quotes from Garrick's well-known "Ode on 
Mr. Pelham." Neither Malone nor Croker 
has anything upon this, and as Boswell himself 
tells us that Pelham died on the day on which 
Mallet's edition of Lord Bolingbroke's works 
came out, and as the first line of his paragraph 
gives the exact date of the event, it is difficult 
to see what ground, and certainly what pressing 
need, there could be for further comment. Yet 
Dr. Birkbeck Hill has no less than four " illus- 
trations." First he tells us, from Walpole's 
letters, that Pelham died of a surfeit. This 



142 Miscellanies. 

suggests another quotation from Johnson him- 
self about the death of Pope, which introduces 
the story of the potted lampreys. Then comes 
a passage from Fielding's " Journal of a Voyage 
to Lisbon," to the effect that he (Fielding) was 
at his worst when Pelham died. Lastly comes 
a second quotation from Walpole, this time from 
his " George IL," in which we are told that the 
king said he should now " have no more peace," 
because Pelham was dead. The recondite eru- 
dition of all this is incontestable, but its utility 
is more than doubtful. Dr. Birkbeck HilFs 
method is seen more serviceably at work in a 
note on Reynolds's visit to Devonshire in 1762. 
First we get a record how Northcote, '^v/ith 
great satisfaction to his mind," touched the skirt 
of Sir Joshua's coat, and this quite naturally re- 
calls the well-known anecdote how Reynolds 
himself in his youth had grasped the hand of the 
great Mr. Pope at Christie's. The transition to 
Pope's own visit as a boy of twelve to Dryden 
at Will's Coffee House thus becomes an easy 
one. "Who touched old Northcote's hand ? " 
says Dr. Birkbeck Hill. " Has the apostolic suc- 
cession been continued? " and then he goes on 
to add : " Since writing these lines I have read 
with pleasure the following passage in Mr. 
Ruskin's ' Prseterita,' chap. i. p. 16: 'When 



BoswelVs Predecessors and Editors. 143 

at three-and-a-half I was taken to have my por- 
trait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been 
ten minutes alone with him before I asked him 
why there were holes in his carpet.' Dryden, 
Pope, Reynolds, Northcote, Ruskin, so runs the 
chain of genius, with only one weak link in it." 
This is an excellent specimen of the concate- 
nated process at the best. We are bound to add 
that there are many as good. We are moreover 
bound to admit that the examples of its abuse 
are by no means obtrusive. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, 
in short, has done his work thoroughly. His 
appendices — ^. ^. those on Johnson's Debates 
in Parliament, and on George Psalmanazar — 
are practically exhaustive, and he has left no 
stone unturned in his labour of interpretation. 
If in the result of that labour there is something 
of what Croker called "surplusage," it must 
also be conceded that Boswell's famous book 
has never before been annotated with equal 
enthusiasm, learning, and industry.-^ 

1 Since this paper was first published, Dr. Birkbeck 
Hill has largely supplemented his Johnson labours by- 
two volumes of letters (1892), and two more of "John- 
sonian Miscellanies " ( 1 897 ) . There have also been several 
other issues of Boswell's " Life," — notably an edition in 
one volume by Mr. Fitzgerald, which is a marvel of 
cheapness, — but that of Dr. Birkbeck Hill is still unri- 
valled in its kind. 



AN ENGLISH ENGRAVER IN PARIS. 

IT is a curious fact — and, if it has not been 
^ already recorded, must assuredly have been 
remarked — that Fate seems always to pro- 
vide the eminent painter with his special and 
particular interpreter on steel or copper. Thus, 
around Reynolds are the great mezzotinters, 
MacArdell, Fisher, Watson, Valentine Green. 
Gainsborough has his nephew Gainsborough 
Dupont ; Constable his Lucas. For Wilson 
there is Woollett ; for Stothard there are Heath 
and Finden. To come to later days, there is 
Turner with his Willmores and Goodalls, and 
Landseer with his brother and (no pun intended) 
his Cousens. Similarly, for Wilkie (after Bur- 
net), the born translator into dot and line seems 
to have been Abraham Raimbach. It was Raim- 
bach who engraved "The Rent Day," " Blind 
Man's Buff," "The Village Politicians," and 
the majority of Sir David's chief works, and it is 
of Raimbach that we now propose to speak. 
Concerning his work as a craftsman, these pages 



An English Engraver in Paris. 14^ 

could scarcely be expected to treat ; and his 
life, the life of a man occupied continuously in 
a sedentary pursuit, and residing, like Stothard, 
almost entirely in one place, affords but little 
incident to invite the chronicler of the pictur- 
esque. But he nevertheless left behind him a 
privately printed memoir, of which a portion at 
least is not without its interest, — the interest 
attaching to every truthful record of occurrences 
which time has pushed backward into that per- 
spective which transforms the trivial. In 1802 
he went to Paris for a couple of months. The 
visits of foreigners to England have not been 
unattractive ; and the visit of an Englishman to 
France, shortly after the Revolution, may also — 
with a few preliminary words as to the tourist — 
supply its memorabilia. 

Raimbach was born on February 16, 1776, in 
Cecil Court, St. Martin's Lane, Westminster, 
a spot remarkable — as far as we can remember — 
for nothing but the fact that Mrs. Hogarth mdre 
had died there some forty years before. His 
father was a naturalised Swiss ; his mother a 
Warwickshire woman, who claimed descent from 
Richard Burbage, the actor of Shakespeare's 
day. His childhood was uneventful, save for 
two incidents. One of these was his falling, 
as a baby, out of a second-floor window, when 



146 Miscellanies. 

he was miraculously '' ballooned" by his long- 
clothes ; the other, his being roused as a little 
boy of four by the roar of the Gordon rioters as 
they rushed through the streets, calling to the 
sleeping inhabitants to light up their windows. 
After a modest education, chiefly at the Library 
School of St. Martin's — where Charles Mathews 
the Elder was his schoolfellow, and Liston after- 
wards held a post as master — he was formally 
apprenticed to Ravenet's pupil, John Hall, his- 
torical engraver to George the Third, and pop- 
ularly regarded as the legitimate successor of 
Woollett. Hall was a man of more than ordi- 
nary cultivation, one of whose daughters had 
married the composer Stephen Storace, — the 
Storace who wrote the music to Colman's 
" Iron Chest," and (as Raimbach recollected) 
superintended the rehearsals thereof from a 
sedan-chair, in which, arrayed in flannels, he 
was carried on to the stage. Hall in his day 
had been introduced to Garrick ; and he was 
sometimes visited by John Kemble, who im- 
pressed the young apprentice with his solemn 
and sepulchral enunciation, and his manifest 
inability to forget, even in private life, that he 
was not before the footlights. Another remem- 
bered visitor was Sheridan, nervously solicitous 
lest Hall, who was engraving his portrait, should 



An English Engraver in Paris. 147 

needlessly emphasise that facial " efflorescence " 
— so familiar in Gillray's caricatures — which 
the too-truthful Sir Joshua had neglected to 
disguise. 

Sheridan, however, could only have appeared 
occasionally in the altitudes of HalFs study. 
But the three flights which ascended to it were 
often climbed by other contemporaries. Ben- 
jamin West (whose " Cromwell dissolving the 
Long Parliament" Hall engraved), Opie and 
Northcote, Flaxman and Westall, all came fre- 
quently on business and pleasure, while the 
eclectic arts were represented by George Stee- 
vens (the Shakespeare critic), John Ireland, (the 
Hogarth commentator), and Dibdin's " Quis- 
quilius/' George Baker, the print-collector and 
laceman of St. PauFs Churchyard. These, with 
Storace and his theatrical circle, must have made 
variety enough in a wearisome craft (for Hall's 
larger plates were many months in hand), and 
their conversation and opinions no doubt con- 
spired to fill the young apprentice with a life- 
long interest in art and the stage. When at 
length, in August, 1796, his period of servitude 
came to an end, the professional outlook was by 
no means a cheerful one. The French Revolu- 
tion was engrossing all men's thoughts, and the 
peaceful arts — that ars longa of the engraver in 



148 Miscellanies. 

particular — were at their lowest ebb, the only 
patrons of prints being the booksellers. Young 
Raimbach's first definite employment was on 
Cooke's "Tales of the Genii," a task which, 
it may be added, was even more precarious than 
usual, inasmuch as it was Cooke's custom, by 
prearrangement, not to pay for the work if he 
did not approve it when finished. Fortunately, 
in this instance, he did approve, and Raimbach 
continued from time to time to reproduce for 
him in copper the designs for books of Thurston, 
the elder Corbould, and Madame D'Arblay's 
clever cousin, Edward Burney. He had long 
been an assiduous Royal Academy student, and 
he speedily "doubled" his profession by min- 
iature-painting, in which — "having," as he 
modestly says, " some facility of execution and 
the very common power [?] of making an in- 
veterate likeness " (at three guineas a head) — 
he attained considerable success. Then, at the 
end of 1 80 1, he procured a commission to exe- 
cute three plates from Smirke's paintings for 
Forster's " Arabian Nights." He had for some 
time been lodging with a French modeller in 
Charles Street, and by this means had improved 
an already respectable acquaintance with the 
French language. With the proceeds of his 
three plates in his pocket, about ^^70, he set 



An English Engraver in Paris. 149 

out in July, 1802, for a fortnight's visit to 
Paris. 

The short-lived Peace of Amiens, patched up 
by the Addington ministry, had been signed in 
the preceding March, and the route to the Con- 
tinent, closed for ten or twelve years, was again 
open. The result was a rush across the Chan- 
nel of all sorts and conditions of Englishmen, 
eager to note the changes resulting from the 
Revolution. Among these, the number of 
painters was considerable, — West, Turner, 
Flaxman, Shee, and Opie being all included. 
Securing a passport from the Secretary of State's 
office — a preliminary precaution which, in those 
days, meant an outlay of £2,^s. — Raimbach 
set out z^ia Brighton and Dieppe. Competition, 
at this time, had reduced the coach fare to the 
former place to half a guinea inside. On July 
9 he embarked for Dieppe in a little vessel, 
landing in France on the following day during 
a glorious sunrise, but drenched to the skin. 
His first impressions of the French v^ere not 
unlike those of Hogarth fifty years before. The 
filth and slovenliness of the people, the number 
and shameless importunity of the beggars, the 
dragging of loaded carts and the bearing of 
heavy burdens by the v^eaker sex — all these, 
with the brusque revolutionary manners and the 



1^0 Miscellanies. 

savage sans-culottism of the men, were things 
for which not even the long ear-pendants and 
picturesque Norman caps of the women could 
entirely atone. From Dieppe the traveller pro- 
ceeded to Rouen in a ramshackle cabriolet, 
drawn by two ill-matched but wiry horses which 
went better than they looked. At Rouen he 
arrived in time for a bread riot, promptly sup- 
pressed by the soldiery ; and he inspected several 
churches, among others St. Maclou, being no 
doubt attracted thereto by the famous door- 
carvings of Jean Goujon. Then, on the im- 
pdriale of a diligence, he made his way through 
the delightful landscape of Northern France, by 
Pontoise and St. Denis, "cemetery of mon- 
archs," to Paris, which he reached on the 
evening of the 12th. 

At Paris he took up his quarters in that " dirt- 
iest and noisiest of streets/' the Rue Montor- 
gueil, where, twenty-two years before, B^ranger 
had been born. Here he was keenly sensible 
of those exhalations in which the French capital 
competed with the " Auld Reekie " of the eigh- 
teenth-century, although, in this instance, they 
were blended and complicated with another 
odour, that of cookery. But, notwithstanding 
an abhorrence of "evil smells" quite equal to 
that of Queen Elizabeth, he speedily became 



An English, Engraver in Paris. i^i 

acclimatised, and pleasantly appreciative of the 
bright, cheerful, many-coloured life of the Pari- 
sian boulevards and the social attractions of the 
table dlidte. In the capital, too, he found that 
the people were less brutal, short-spoken, and 
surly than in the provinces, and that the Revo- 
lution, which had disfigured their palaces and 
monuments,-^ had not wholly effaced their tradi- 
tional politeness. On the second day after his 
arrival took place the annual fetes of July in 
memory of the destruction of the Bastille. There 
were to be reviews and illuminations, fireworks 
on the Pont Neuf, dancing and mats de cocagne 
m the Champs-Elys^es and Place Vend6me, and 
free plays and concerts in the Tuileries gardens. 
But the weather was finer than the show. ''The 
fireworks on the bridge would not go off ; the 
concert in the garden could not be heard, and 
the illuminations, though in good taste, were not 
sufficiently general to mark a decided national 
feeling." It is consoling to our insular self- 
esteem that neither this celebration, nor that in- 
augurating Bonaparte as First Consul, which 
took place shortly afterwards, could be com- 

1 The Tuileries still bore the words, " dix d' Aoilt " 
painted in white letters wherever the cannon-balls had 
struck. Arthur Moore was looking on {Journaly 1793, 
i. 26). 



1^2 Miscellanies. 

pared, in the opinion of this observer, with the 
Jubilee of George the Third, or the Coronation 
of George the Fourth, at both of which he sub- 
sequently assisted. 

He was naturally anxious to get a glimpse of 
the famous First Consul, but of this he had 
little hope, as Bonaparte seldom appeared in 
public except at a review or a theatre, and in the 
latter case always without previous announce- 
ment. After fruitless attempts to see the 
''modern Attila " at the Opera and Theatre Fran- 
9ais, Raimbach was at length fortunate enough 
to effect his object at an inspection of the garri- 
son of Paris in the Place du Carrousel, where he 
paid six francs for a seat at a first-floor window. 
After five-and-thirty years he still remembered 
vividly the small, thin, grave figure, — in the blue 
unornamented uniform, plain cocked hat, white 
pantaloons and jockey boots, — which, sur- 
rounded by a brilliant staff (among whom the 
Mameluke Roustan was conspicuous by his 
eastern costume), rode rapidly down the lines 
at a hand-canter on Marengo, made a brief 
speech to the soldiers, saluted them with mili- 
tary formality, and then passed back under the 
archway of the Tuileries. Napoleon at this 
date was about thirty-two. Raimbach never 
saw him again, and beyond a casual inspection 



An English Engraver in Paris. 1^3 

of the ladies of the Bonaparte family at Notre 
Dame, enjoyed no second opportunity of study- 
ing the ruling race. But there were many things 
of compensating interest. At the Jardin des 
Plantes, for instance, there was an enormous 
female elephant, which had been transferred by 
right of conquest from the Stadtholder's collec- 
tion at the Hague, and had brought its English 
keeper with it into captivity. Then there were 
the noble halls and galleries of the Louvre, 
crowded with the fruits of French victories 
(" les fruits de nos victoiresl "), statues and 
pictures of all countries, and all exhibited free 
of charge to an exultant public. The Apollo 
Belvedere from the Vatican was already in- 
stalled, and while Raimbach was still at Paris 
arrived the famous Venus de' Medici. Prob- 
ably so splendid a "loan collection" had never 
before been brought together. 

It was this no doubt which attracted so many 
English artists to Paris, where French spolia- 
tion enabled them to study comparatively a pic- 
torial collocation which nothing but the Grand 
Tour could otherwise have presented to them. 
Here, in all their glory, were Rembrandt and 
Rubens, with the best of the Dutch and Flemish 
schools. Raphael's glorious *' Transfiguration ; " 
the great rival altarpiece of Domenichino, the 



154 Miscellanies. 

*' Communion of St. Jerome ; " Correggio's 
"Marriage of St. Catherine," — all these, to- 
gether with many of the choicest specimens of 
the Carracci, of Guido, of Albano, of Guercino, 
were at this time to be seen in the long gallery 
of the Louvre, which Raimbach not only visited 
frequently, but drew in almost daily. In the 
magnificent Hall of Antiques, besides, he made 
the acquaintance of more than one contempo- 
rary French painter. Isabey, the miniaturist; 
Carle Vernet ; his greater son, Horace, at this 
time a bright boy of thirteen or fourteen, were 
all then living in apartments adjoining the gal- 
leries, and in some cases at Government expense 
To the illustrious leader of the new Imperio- 
Classical School, which had succeeded with its 
wide-striding and brickdust-coloured nudities to 
the rosy mignardises of Fragonard and Boucher, 
Raimbach was not, however, introduced. M. 
Jacques Louis David, whose friendship with 
Robespierre had not only acquainted him with 
the interior of a prison, but had also brought 
him perilously close to the guillotine itself, was 
for the moment living in prudent seclusion, 
dividing his attentions between his palette and 
his violoncello. Meanwhile, a good example of 
his manner, "The Sabines " (which Raimbach 
calls " Rape of the Sabines"), executed imme- 



An English Engraver in Paris. 155 

diately after his release from the Luxembourg, 
and popularly supposed to allude to the heroic 
efforts which Madame David had made for her 
husband's safety, was at this time being exhib- 
ited to a public who were divided between 
enthusiasm for the subject and indignation at the 
door-money — door-money apparently having 
never before been charged for showing a pic- 
ture. Of David's pupils and followers, Gerard, 
Girodet, Gros, Guerin, Ingres, and the rest, 
Raimbach also speaks, but, as in the case of the 
master himself, more from hearsay than personal 
experience. On the other hand, one of his own 
compatriots, Benjamin West, the favourite 
painter of George the Third 

(Of modern works he makes a jest 
Except the works of Mr. West), 

was very much en Evidence in public places. He 
had succeeded Reynolds as President of the 
Royal Academy, and the diplomatic French 
notabilities were doing their best to flatter him 
into the belief that Bonaparte was not only the 
greatest of men but of art collectors. Indeed, 
•the First Consul himself favoured this idea by 
personally commending West's own '* Death on 
the Pale Horse," the finished sketch of which 
he had brought with him from England to ex- 



1^6 Miscellanies. 

hibit at the Salon. West, whose weakness was 
" more than female vanity/' was by no means 
backward in acknowledging these politic, if not 
perfidious, attentions, which he accepted without 
suspicion. " Wherever I went," he said simply, 
" people looked at me, and ministers and men 
of influence in the State were constantly in my 
company. I was one day in the Louvre — all 
eyes were upon me, and I could not help ob- 
serving to Charles Fox, j^ho happened to be 
walking with me, how strong was the love of Art 
and admiration of its professors in France." 
Fox, whose reputation as an orator and a patriot 
had preceded him, was naturally the observed of 
all observers, and he was besides the object of 
special attentions on the part of Bonaparte. 

Fox's chief mission to Paris, according to 
his biographer. Lord Russell, was to search the 
archives for his " History of the Revolution of 
1688." But transcribing the correspondence 
of Barillon did not so exclusively occupy him 
as to divert him from the charms of the Theatre 
Fran^ais, or, as it was at this time called, the 
"Theatre de la Republique." Fox went fre- 
quently to see that queen of tragedy Mile. 
Duchesnois, of whom it was said, " qu'elle 
avait des larmes dans la voix." ^ He saw her 

1 Thackeray, who applies this to Gay, quotes it of 
Rubini. 



An English Engraver in Paris. 157 

in *' Andromaque " and '^ Ph^dre," and as 
Roxane in " Bajazet." Raimbach also, as 
might be anticipated from the schoolfellow of 
Charles Mathews and the admirer of Kemble, 
did not neglect the French theatres, which, 
he notes, were at this time more numerous 
than in all the other capitals of Europe put to- 
gether. At the Grand Opera, then rechristened 
''Theatre de la R^publique et des Arts," he 
heard the opera of " Anacr^on," in which the 
principal male singer was Francois Lays, or 
Lais, and the foremost female that Mile. Maill- 
ard to whom tradition assigned the part of the 
Goddess of Reason at the celebration of 1793, 
which celebration, indeed, had been arranged 
by Lais with the prophet of the cult, Chaumette. 
Raimbach, however, thought little, as a singer, 
of the lady, who had just succeeded to the 
place of her preceptress, the accomplished Mile. 
St. Huberti, who, as Countess d'Entraigues, 
was cruelly murdered with her husband at 
Barnes Terrace some few years later by an 
Italian valet. ^ But he was charmed with the 
vocalisation of Lais, and delighted with the 
ballet, which included the elder Vestris (" Diou'' 

1 In 181 2. There is an account of this tragedy in the 
•' Walk from London to Kew " of Sir Richard Phillips, 
1817. 



158 Miscellanies. 

de la danse) and Mme. Gardel. In particular 
the young engraver remembered an English 
hornpipe, executed in a jockey's dress by one 
Beaupr^, which excelled anything of the kind 
he had ever seen in his own country. At the 
Theatre Frangais, — possibly because his tastes 
lay rather in comedy than tragedy, — Raimbach 
says nothing of Racine and Mile. Duchesnois. 
But he speaks of Monvel, the sole survivor of 
the old school of the Lekains and Pr^villes and 
Barons, as still charming in spite of age and loss 
of teeth ; and he also saw that practical joker 
and pet of the Parisians, Dugazon, who must 
have been almost as diminutive as Addison's 
"little Dickey," Henry Morris.^ But after 
Pr^ville he was the prince of stage valets, 
and despite a tendency to exaggeration (which 
Raimbach duly chronicles), almost perfect in 
his own line. Another stage luminary men- 
tioned by Raimbach is Monvel's daughter, 
Mile. Mars, at this time only three-and-twenty, 

1 It was Dugazon who cajoled the original Bartholo 
of the Barbier, Desessarts (who was enormously fat), into 
applying for the post of elephant to the Court. When the 
irate Desessarts afterwards challenged him, Dugazon, by 
gravely chalking a circle upon his adversary, and propos- 
ing that all punctures outside the ring should count for 
nothing, turned the whole affair into ridicule. 



An English Engraver in Paris. 159 

and not yet displaying those supreme quali- 
ties which afterwards made her unrivalled in 
Europe. But she was already seductive as an 
ingenue ; and her performance of Angelique in 
" La Fausse Agn^s " of N^ricault Destouches 
(which Arthur Murphy afterwards borrowed for 
his farce of the ^' Citizen)," is declared by 
Raimbach to have been *' replete with grace 
and good taste." Finally^ Raimbach saw the 
First Consul's tragedian, Talma, then in the 
height of his powers, and continuing success- 
fully those reforms of costume and declamation 
which he was supposed to have learned in 
England. John Kemble, who was also visiting 
Paris, where he was hospitably entertained by 
the French actors, was now in his turn taking 
hints from Talma, for it was observable that 
when he got back to London he adopted 
Talma's costume for the Orestes of the " Dis- 
tressed Mother." 

The Italian Opera, of course, was not open, 
and of the remaining actors Raimbach says not 
very much. At the Vaudeville he saw Laporte, 
the leading harlequin of the day, and at Picart's 
Theatre in the Rue Feydeau witnessed what 
must have been the ''Tom Jones ^ Londres " 
of M. Desforges, in which Picart himself^ who 
was a better author than actor, took the part of 



i6o Miscellanies. 

the so-called " Squire Westiern/' This repre- 
sentation, as might be expected, was amusing 
for its absurdities rather than its merits. But 
it can hardly have been more ridiculous to an 
Englishman than Poinsinet's earlier Comedie 
Lyrique, where Western and " Tami Jone " 
pursue the flying hart to the accompaniment of 
cors de chasse and the orthodox French hallali. 
Another (unconsciously) theatrical exhibition 
which Raimbach occasionally attended, was the 
Tribunal, one of the new Legislative bodies 
that at this time held its sittings in the Palais 
Royal, then, on that account, re-christened 
Palais du Tribunat. Here he met with the 
notorious Lewis Goldsmith, not, as afterwards, 
the inveterate assailant of Napoleon, but for 
the moment actively engaged in editing a paper 
called "The Argus; or, London Reviewed in 
Paris," which attacked the war and the Eng- 
lish Government. At the Tribunat Goldsmith 
pointed out several of the minor men of the 
Revolution to Raimbach. But it was a colour- 
less assembly, wholly in the power of the im- 
perious First Consul, and its meetings had little 
instruction for a stranger. Goldsmith, however, 
was not the sole compatriot Raimbach met in 
the Palais Royal. In the salons litUraires he 
came frequently in contact with Thomas Hoi- 



An English Engraver in Paris. i6i 

croft, of the " Road to Ruin." Holcroft had 
married a French wife, had a family, and was 
engaged in preparing those " Travels in France," 
which Sir Richard Phillips afterwards published. 
Holcroft was a friend of Opie (then also in 
Paris), who painted the portrait of him now at St. 
Martin's Place ; but from Raimbach's account 
he must have been far more petulant and irri- 
table than befitted the austere philosopher of his 
writings. Of another person whom Raimbach 
mentions he gives a rosier account than is given 
generally. At the Caf6 Jacob in the Rue 
Jacob, an obscure cabaret in an obscure street, 
was frequently to be seen the once redoubtable 
Thomas Paine, then about sixty-five. Contem- 
poraries represent him at this date as not only 
fallen upon evil days, but dirty in his person 
and unduly addicted to spirits. That the 
general appearance of the author of the " Rights 
of Man" was "mean and poverty-stricken," 
and that he was " much withered and care- 
worn," Raimbach admits, and he moreover 
adds that " he had sunk into complete insignifi- 
cance, and was quite unnoticed by the Govern- 
ment." But he also describes him as "fluent 
in speech, of mild and gentle demeanour, clear 
and distinct in enunciation," and endowed with 
an "exceedingly soft and agreeable voice" — 



1 62 Miscellanies. 

words which, in this connection, somehow 
remind one of Lord Foppington's philosophic 
eulogy of Miss Hoyden. Certainly they 
scarcely suggest the red-nosed and dilapidated 
personage who drank brandy and declaimed 
against Religion in his cups with whom modern 
records have acquainted us. 

Raimbach's remaining experiences must be 
rapidly summarised. He attended the Palais 
de Justice, and was much impressed by the 
French forensic oratory. Concerning the ora- 
tory of the pulpit he is not equally enthusiastic, 
observing, indeed, that he should think the 
cause of religion derived little support from the 
eloquence of the clergy. But it must be re- 
membered that at this period most of the priests 
were expatriated, and many of the churches 
were still used as warehouses and stables. One 
close by him in the Riie Montorgueil was, as a 
matter of fact, employed as a saddler's shop. He 
was much interested in the now dispersed col- 
lection brought together in the Mus6e des Mon- 
uments in the Petits-Augustins by M. Alexandre 
Lenoir, the artist and antiquary. This consisted 
of such monumental efforts as had escaped 
the fury of the Terror — escaping, it should be 
added, only miserably mutilated and defaced. 
Lenoir, who had received a severe bayonet 



An English Engraver in Paris, 16} 

wound in attempting to defend the tomb of 
Richelieu, had admirably arranged these waifs 
and strays, and the collection of eighteenth 
century sculpture was especially notable, as were 
also the specimens of stained glass. Among 
Raimbach's personal experiences came the suc- 
cessful consumption at Vary's in the Palais 
Royal of a fricassde of frogs. But this was done 
in ignorance, and not of set purpose, as in the 
case of the epicure, Charles Lamb, who speaks 
of them as "the nicest little delicate things." 
Raimbach's return to England, somewhat precipi- 
tated by the fury of the First Consul at the attacks 
upon him in the Morning Chronicle, was made 
by the Picardy route. At Calais he spent a day 
at the historical Lion d'Argent,^ where Hogarth 
and so many of his fellow countrymen had been 
before him, and he reached Dover shortly after- 
wards, giving, with his party, three ringing cheers 
at once more treading upon English soil. He 
had been absent two months instead of two 
weeks. His impressions de voyage, which oc- 
cupy nearly half his " Memoirs," would have 
gained in permanent charm if he had described 
more and reflected less. All the same, his trip 

1 Mrs. Carter {Memoirs, i. 253) says, in June, 1763: 
" I am sorry to say it, but it is fact, that the Lion d'Argent 
at Calais is a much better inn than any I saw at Dover." 



164 Miscellanies. 

to Paris as a young man in 1802 was the one 
event of his career, for though he went abroad 
again on two or three occasions, received a gold 
medal from the Salon in 1814, for his engraving 
of "The Village Politicians," was f^ted by 
Baron Gerard in 1825, and made a Correspond- 
ing Member of the Institute ten years later, the 
rest of his recollections are comparatively un- 
interesting, except for his intercourse with 
Wilkie, of whom he wrote a brief biography. 
He died in January, 1843, in his sixty-seventh 
year. 



THE ''VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" AND 
ITS ILLUSTRATORS. 

NOT many years since, d propos of a certain 
volume of epistolary parodies, the para- 
graphists were busily discussing the different 
aspects which the characters of fiction present 
to different readers. It was shown that, not 
only as regards the fainter and less strongly 
drawn figures, — the Frank Osbaldistones, the 
Clive Newcomes, the David Copperfields, — 
but even as regards what Gautier would have 
called '' the grotesques," — the Costigans, the 
Swivellers, the Gamps, — each admirer, in his 
separate " study of imagination," had his own 
idea, which was not that of another. What is 
true of the intellectual perception is equally true 
of the pictorial. Nothing is more notable than 
the diversities afforded by the same book when 
illustrated by different artists. Contrast for a 
moment the Don Quixotes of Smirke, of Tony 
Johannot, of Gustave Dor^ ; contrast the Fal- 
staffs of Kenny Meadows, of Sir John Gilbert, 



1 66 Miscellanies. 

of Mr. Edwin A, Abbey. Or, to take a better 
instance, compare the contemporary illustrations 
of Dickens with the modern designs of (say) 
Charles Green or Frederick Barnard. The 
variations, it will at once be manifest, are not 
the mere variations arising from ampler resource 
or from fuller academic skill on the part of the 
younger men. It is not alone that they have 
conquered the inner secret of Du Maurier's 
artistic stumbling-blocks — the irreconcilable 
chimney-pot hat, the "terrible trousers," the 
unspeakable evening clothes of the Victorian 
era : it is that their point of view is different. 
Nay, in the case of Barnard, one of the first, if 
not the first, of modern humorous designers, 
although he is studiously loyal to the Dickens 
tradition as revealed by " Phiz " and Cruik- 
shank, he is at the same time as unlike them as 
it is well possible to be. To this individual and 
personal attitude of the artist must be added, 
among other things, the further fact that each 
age has a trick of investing the book it decorates 
with something of its own temperament and at- 
mosphere. It may faithfully endeavour to revive 
costume ; it may reproduce accessory with the 
utmost care ; but it can never look with the old 
eyes, or see exactly in the old way. Of these 
positions, the ^' Vicar of Wakefield " is as good 



The ''Vicar of Wakefieldr ' 167 

an example as any. Between its earlier illus- 
trated editions and those of the last half century 
the gulf is wide ; while the portraits of Dr. 
Primrose as presented by Rowlandson on the 
one hand and Stothard on the other are as strik- 
ingly in contrast as any of the cases above indi- 
cated. We shall add what is practically a fresh 
chapter to a hackneyed history if for a page or 
two we attempt to give some account of Gold- 
smith's story considered exclusively in its aspect 
as an illustrated book. 

To the first edition of 1766 there were no 
illustrations. The two duodecimo volumes "on 
grey paper with blunt type," printed at Salis- 
bury in that year "by B. Collins, for F. New- 
bery/' were without embellishments of any kind ; 
and the sixth issue of 1779 had been reached be-' 
fore we come to the earliest native attempt at 
any pictorial realisation of the characters. In 
the following year appeared the first illustrated 
English edition, being two tiny booklets bearing 
the imprint of one J. Wenman, of 144 Fleet 
Street, and containing a couple of poorly-exe- 
cuted frontispieces by the miniaturist, Daniel 
Dodd. They represent the Vicar taking leave 
of George, and Olivia and the Landlady — a 
choice of subjects in which the artist had many 
subsequent imitators. The designs have little 



1 68 Miscellanies. 

distinction but that of priority, and can claim no 
higher merit than attaches to the cheap adorn- 
ments of a cheap publication. Dodd is seen to 
greater advantage in one of the two plates 
which, about the same date, figured in Harri- 
son's " Novelist's Magazine/' and also in the 
octavo edition of the " Vicar," printed for the 
same publisher in 1781. These plates have 
the pretty old-fashioned ornamental framework 
which the elder Heath and his colleagues had 
borrowed from the French vignettists. Dodd 
illustrates the episode of the pocket-book, while 
his companion Walker, at once engraver and 
designer, selects the second rescue of Sophia at 
the precise moment when Burchell's "great 
stick" has shivered the small sword of Mr. 
Timothy Baxter. Walker's design is the better 
of the two ; but their main interest is that of 
costume-pieces, and in both the story is told by 
gesture rather than by expression. 

So natural is it to associate the grace of 
Stothard with the grace of Goldsmith, that one 
almost resents the fact that, in the collection for 
which he did so much, the task of illustrating the 
" Vicar " fell into other hands. But as his first re- 
lations with Harrison's " Magazine " are alleged 
to have originated in an application made to him 
to correct a drawing by Dodd for " Joseph 



The ''Vicar of Wakefield:' 169 

Andrews,"^ it is probable that, before he began 
to work regularly for the publisher, the plates 
for the ^^ Vicar " had already been arranged for. 
Yet it was not long before he was engaged upon 
the book. In 1792^ was published an octavo 
edition, the plates of which were beautifully en- 
graved by Basire's pupil and Blake's partner, 
James Parker. Stothard's designs, six in num- 
ber, illustrate the Vicar taking leave of George, 
the Rescue of Sophia from Drowning, the Honey- 
suckle Arbour, the Vicar and Olivia, the Prison 
Sermon, and the Family Party at the end. The 
best of them, perhaps, is that in which Olivia's 
father, with an inexpressible tenderness of ges- 
ture, lifts the half-sinking, half-kneeling form of 
his repentant daughter. But though none can 
be said to be wanting in that grace which is the 
unfailing characteristic of the artist, upon the 
whole they are not chefs-d'oeuvre. Certainly 
they are not as good as the best of the " Clar- 
issa" series in Harrison; they are not even 
better than the illustrations to Sterne, the origi- 
nals of which are at South Kensington. In- 

1 Pye's " Patronage of British Art," 1845, PP- 247-8. 

2 An imaginary fi-ontispiece portrait of the Vicar, pre- 
fixed to a one-volume issue of 1790, has not been here 
regarded as entitling the book to rank as an " illustrated " 
edition. There is no artist's name to the print. 



170 Miscellanies. 

deed, there is at South Kensington a circular 
composition by Stothard from the " Vicar " — a 
lightly-washed sketch in Indian ink — which 
surpasses them all. The moment selected is ob- 
scure ; but the persons represented are plainly 
the Wakefield family, Sir William Thornhill and 
the 'Squire. The 'Squire is speaking, Olivia 
hides her face in her mother's lap, Dr. Prim- 
rose listens with bent head, and the ci-devant 
Mr. Burchell looks sternly at his nephew. The 
entire group, which is admirable in refinement 
and composition, has all the serene gravity of a 
drawing by Flaxman. Besides the above, and 
a pair of plates to be mentioned presently, 
Stothard did a set of twenty-four minute head- 
pieces to a Memorandum Book for 1805 (or 
thereabouts), all of which were derived from 
Goldsmith's novel, and these probably do not 
exhaust his efforts in this direction. 

After the Stothard of 1792 comes a succession 
of editions more or less illustrated. In 1793 
Cooke published the "Vicar" in his "Select 
Novels," with a vignette and plate by R. Cor- 
bould, and a plate by Anker Smith. The last, 
which depicts " Olivia rejecting with disdain the 
offer of a Purse of Money from 'Squire Thorn- 
hill," is not only a dainty little picture, but 
serves to exemplify some of the remarks at the 



The ''Vicar of Wakefield^ 171 

outset of this paper. Seven-and-twenty years 
later, the same design was re-engraved as the 
frontispiece of an edition published by Dean and 
Munday, and the costumes were modernised to 
date. The 'Squire Thornhill of 1793 has a three- 
cornered hat and ruffles ; in 1820 he wears 
whiskers, a stiff cravat with a little collar, and 
a cocked hat set athwartships. Olivia, who dis- 
dained him in 1793 in a cap and sash, disdains 
him in 1820 in her own hair and a high waist. 
Corbould's illustrations to these volumes are 
commonplace. But he does better in the five 
plates which he supplied to Whittingham's edi- 
tion of 1800, three of which, the Honeysuckle 
Arbour, Moses starting on his Journey, and 
Olivia and the Landlady, are pleasant enough. 
In 1808 followed an edition with a charming 
frontispiece by Stothard, in which the Vicar 
with his arm in a sling is endeavouring to recon- 
cile Mrs. Primrose to Olivia. There is also a 
vignette by the same hand. These, engraved at 
first by Heath, were repeated in 181 3 by J. 
Romney. In the same year the book appeared 
in the '' Mirror of Amusement" with three 
plates by that artistic Jack-of-all-trades, William 
Marshall Craig, sometime drawing-master to the 
Princess Charlotte of Wales. There are also edi- 
tions in 18 1 2, 1823, and 1824, with frontispieces 



172 Miscellanies. 

by the Academician, Thomas Uwins. But, as 
an interpreter of Goldsmith, the painter of the 
once-popular " Chapeau de Brigand " is not 
inspiriting. 

In following the line of engravers on copper, 
soon to be superseded by steel, we have ne- 
glected the sister art of engraving upon wood, 
of which the revival is practically synchronous 
with Harrison's " Magazine." The first edition 
of the "Vicar" decorated with what Horace 
Walpole contemptuously called " wooden cuts," 
is dated 1798. It has seven designs, three of 
which are by an unknown person called Egin- 
ton, and the remainder by Thomas Bewick, by 
whom all of them are engraved. Eginton may 
be at once dismissed ; but Bewick's own work, 
notwithstanding his genuine admiration for 
Goldsmith, arouses no particular enthusiasm. 
He was too original to be the illustrator of other 
men's ideas, and his designs, though fair speci- 
mens of his technique as a xylographer, are poor 
as artistic conceptions. The most successful is 
the Procession to Church, the stubbornness of 
Blackberry, as may be imagined, being effec- 
tively rendered. Frontispieces by Bewick also 
appear in editions of 1810 and 1812 ; and be- 
tween 1807 and 1 810 the records speak of three 
American issues with woodcuts by Bewick's 



The ''Vicar of Wakefield^ 173 

trans-Atlantic imitator, Alexander Anderson. 
Whether these were or were not merely copies 
of Bewick, like much of Anderson's work, can- 
not be affirmed without inspection. Nor, for 
the same reason, is it possible to refer with 
certainty to the edition illustrated by Thurston 
and engraved by Bewick's pupil, Luke Clennell, 
of which Linton speaks in his " Masters of 
Wood Engraving " as containing a " ' Mr. Bur- 
chell in the hayfield reading to the two Primrose 
girls/ full of drawing and daylight," which 
should be worth seeing. But the triumph of 
woodcut copies at this date is undoubtedly the 
so-called " Whittingham's edition" of 181 5. 
This is illustrated by thirty-seven woodcuts and 
tailpieces engraved by the prince of modern 
wood-engravers, John Thompson. The artist's 
name has been modestly withheld, and the de- 
signs are sometimes attributed to Thurston, but 
they are not entirely in his manner, and we are 
inclined to assign them to Samuel Williams. In 
any case, they are unpretending little pieces, 
simple in treatment, and sympathetic in char- 
acter. The Vicar Consoled by his Little Boys, 
and the Two Girls and the Fortune-teller, may 
be cited as favourable examples. But the 
scale is too small for much play of expression. 
'' Whittingham's edition " was very popular, and 



174 Miscellanies. 

copies are by no means rare. It was certainly 
republished in 1822 and 1825, and probably 
there are other issues. And so we come to that 
most extraordinary of contributions by a popu- 
lar designer to the embellishment of a popular 
author, the *' Vicar" of Thomas Rowlandson. 

Rowlandson was primarily a caricaturist, and 
his " Vicar" is a caricature. He was not with- 
out artistic power ; he could, if he liked, draw a 
beautiful woman (it is true that his ideal generally 
deserves those epithets of ^^ plantar eux, luxuri- 
ant, exuhiranf' which the painter in " Gerfaut" 
gives to the charms of Mile. Reine Gobillot) ; 
but he did not care to modify his ordinary style. 
Consequently he illustrated Goldsmith's master- 
piece as he illustrated Combe's " Doctor Syn- 
tax," and the result is a pictorial outrage. The 
unhappy Primrose family romp through his 
pages, vulgarised by all sorts of indignities, and 
the reader reaches the last of the " twenty-four 
coloured plates " which Ackermann put forth in 
1817, and again in 1823, as one escaping from 
a nightmare. It is only necessary to glance at 
Stothard's charming little plate of Hunt the 
Slipper in Rogers's " Pleasures of Memory" of 
1802 to see how far from the Goldsmith spirit 
is Rowlandson's treatment of the same pastime. 
Where he is most endurable, is where his de- 



The ''Vicar of Wakefield.'' 175 

signs to the "Vicar" have the least relation 
to the personages of the book, as, for example, 
in " A Connoisseur Mellowing the Tone of a 
Picture," which is simply a humorous print 
neither better nor worse than any of the other 
humorous prints with which he was wont to fill 
the windows of the •* Repository of Arts" in 
Piccadilly. 

It is a relief to turn from the rotundities of 
Rowlandson to the edition which immediately 
followed — that known to collectors as Sharpens. 
It contains five illustrations by Richard Westall, 
engraved on copper by Corbould, Warren, 
Romney, and others. Westall's designs are of 
the school of Stothard — that is to say, they are 
graceful and elegant rather than humorous ; 
but they are most beautifully rendered by their 
engravers. The Honeysuckle Arbour (George 
Corbould), where the girls lean across the table 
to watch the labouring stag as it pants past, 
is one of the most brilliant little pictures we 
can remember. In 1829, William Finden re- 
engraved the whole of these designs on steel, 
slightly reducing them in size, and the merits 
of the two methods may be compared. It is 
hard to adjudge the palm. Finden's fifth plate 
especially, depicting Sophia's return to the Vicar 
in Prison, is a miracle of executive delicacy. 



176 Miscellanies. 

Goldsmith's next illustrators of importance 
are Cruikshank and Mulready. The contribu- 
tions of the former are limited to two plates 
for vol. X. (1832) of Roscoe's ^' Novelist's 
Library." They are not successes. The kindly 
Genius of Broadgrin is hardly as coarse as 
Rowlandson, but his efforts to make his subjects 
" comic " at all hazards are not the less disas- 
trous, and there is little of the Vicar, or Mrs. 
Primrose, or even Moses, in the sketch with 
which he illustrates the tragedy of the gross 
of green spectacles ; while the most salient 
characteristic of the somewhat more successful 
Hunt the Slipper is the artist's inveterate ten- 
dency to make the waists of his women (in the 
words of Pope's imitation of Prior), '* fine by 
defect, and delicately weak." Mulready's de- 
signs (1843), excellently interpreted by John 
Thompson, have a far greater reputation, — a 
reputation heightened not a little by the familiar 
group of pictures which he elaborated from 
three of the sketches. Choosing the Wedding 
Gown, the Whistonian Controversy, and Sophia 
and Burchell Haymaking, with their unrivalled 
rendering of texture and material, are among 
the painter's most successful works in oil ; and 
it is the fashion to speak of his illustrated 
" Vicar" as if all of its designs were at the 



The ''Vicar of Wakefield^ 177 

same artistic level. This is by no means the 
case. Some of them, e.g., Olivia measuring 
herself with the 'Squire, have playfulness and 
charm, but the majority, besides being crowded 
in composition, are heavy and unattractive. 
Mulready's paintings, however, and the gener- 
ally diffused feeling that the domestic note in 
his work should make him a born illustrator of 
Goldsmith, have given him a prestige which can- 
not now be gainsaid. 

After Mulready follows a crowd of minor 
illustrators. One of the most successful of 
these was the clever artist George Thomas ; 
one of the most disappointing, because his gifts 
were of so high an order, was G. J. Pinwell. 
Of Absolon, Anelay, Gilbert, and the rest, it is 
impossible to speak here, and we must close 
this rapid summary with brief reference to some 
of the foreign editions. 

At the beginning of this paper, in enumerat- 
ing certain of the causes for the diversities, 
pleasing or otherwise, which prevail in illus- 
trated copies of the classics, we purposely re- 
served one which it is more convenient to treat 
in connection with those books when "embel- 
lished" by foreign artists. If, even in the 
country of birth, each age (as has been well 
said of translations) '^ a eu de ce c6U son helvi- 
12 



178 Miscellanies. 

ddre different,''' it follows that every other coun- 
try will have its point of view, which will be at 
variance with that of a native. To say that no 
book dealing with human nature in the abstract 
is capable of being adequately illustrated except 
in the country of its origin, would be to state 
a proposition in imminent danger of prompt 
contradiction. But it may be safely asserted, 
that, except by an artist who, from long resi- 
dence or familiarity, has enjoyed unusual facili- 
ties for assimilating the national atmosphere, no 
novel of manners (to which class the '^ Vicar" 
must undoubtedly be held to belong) can be 
illustrated with complete success by a foreigner. 
For this reason, it will not be necessary here to 
do more than refer briefly to the principal French 
and German editions. In either country the 
" Vicar "has had the advantage of being artisti- 
cally interpreted by draughtsmen of marked 
ability ; but in both cases the solecisms are 
thicker than the beauties. 

It must be admitted, notwithstanding, for 
Germany, that it was earlier in the field than 
England. Wenman's edition is dated 1780; but 
it was in 1776 that August Mylius of Berlin 
issued the first frontispiece of the " Vicar." It 
is an etching by the " Berlin Hogarth," Daniel 
Chodowiecki, prefixed to an English reprint of 



The "■ Vicar of Wakefield:' 179 

the second edition, and it represents the popular 
episode of Mr. Burchell and the pocket-book. 
The poor Vicar is transformed into a loose- 
lipped, heavy-jowled German pastor in a dress- 
ing-gown and slippers, while Mr. Burchell 
becomes a slim personage in top-boots, and 
such a huntsman's cap as stage tradition assigns 
to Tony Lumpkin. In the " Almanac Genea- 
logique " for 1777, Chodowiecki returned to this 
subject, and produced a series of twelve charm- 
ing plates — little marvels of delicate execution 
— upon the same theme. Some of these, e. g., 
the '• Conversation brillante des Dames de la 
ville " and " George sur le T6atre (sic) recon- 
noit son P6re '' — are delightfully quaint. But 
they are not illustrations of the text — and there 
is no more to say. The same radical objection 
applies to the illustrations, full of fancy, inge- 
nuity, and playfulness as they are, of another 
German, Ludwig Richter. His edition has 
often been reprinted. But it is sufficient to 
glance at his barefooted Sophia, making hay, 
with her straw hat at her back, in order to de- 
cide against it. One crosses out "Sophia" 
and writes in *' Frederika." She may have 
lived at Sesenheim, but never at Wakefield. In 
like manner, the insular mind recoils from the 
spectacle of the patriarchal Jenkinson studying 



1 80 Miscellanies. 

the Cosmogony in company with a tankard of a 
pattern unmistakably Teutonic. 

In France, to judge by certain entries in 
Cohen's invaluable " Guide de TAmateur de 
Livres k Vignettes," the book seems to have 
been illustrated as early as the end of the last 
century. Huot and Texier are mentioned as 
artists, but their works have escaped us. The 
chief French edition, however, is that which be- 
longs to the famous series of books with " images 
incmsUes en plein texte " (as Jules Janin says), 
inaugurated in 1835 by the " Gil Bias " of Jean 
Gigoux. The " Vicaire de Wakefield" (Bour- 
gueleret, 1838), admirably paraphrased by 
Charles Nodier, was accompanied by ten en- 
gravings on steel by William Finden after Tony 
Johannot, and a number of small woodcuts, en- 
Utes and culs- de-lamp e by Janet Lange, Charles 
Jacque, and C. Marville.^ As compositions, 
Johannot's contributions are effective, but highly 
theatrical, while his types are frankly French. 
Of the woodcuts it may be sufficient to note 
that when the Vicar and Mrs. Primrose discuss 
the prospects of the family in the privacy of their 
own chamber, they do so (in the picture) from 
two separate four-posters with twisted uprights, 

1 To the edition of 1843, which does not contain these 
woodcuts, is added one by Meissonier. 



The '' Vicar of Wakefield:' i8i 

and a crucifix between them. The same eccen- 
tricities, though scarcely so naively ignorant, 
are not entirely absent from the work of two 
much more modern artists, M. V. A. Poirson 
and M. Adolphe Lalauze. M. Poirson (Quan- 
tin, i88^^) who, in his own domain, has extraor- 
dinary skill as a decorative artist, depicts 'Squire 
Thornhill as a gay young French chasseur with 
many-buttoned gaiters and a fusil en bandoulidre, 
while the hero of the " Elegy on a Mad Dog '' 
appears in those " wooden shoes" (with straw 
in them) which for so long a period were to 
English cobblers the chief terror of a French 
invasion. M. Lalauze again (Jouaust, 1888), 
for whose distinguished gifts (in their place) we 
have the keenest admiration, promotes the whole 
Wakefield family into the haute noblesse. An 
elegant Dr. Primrose blesses an elegant George 
with the air of a Rochefoucauld, while Mrs. 
Primrose, in the background, with the Bible and 
cane, is a grande dame. Under the same treat- 
ment, the scene in the hayfield becomes a flie 
galante after the fashion of Lancret or Watteau. 
Upon the whole, dismissing foreign artists for 
the reason given above, one is forced to the con- 
clusion that Goldsmith has not hitherto found 
his fitting pictorial interpreter. Stothard and 
Mulready have accentuated his graver side ; 



1 82 Miscellanies. 

Crulkshank and Rowlandson have exaggerated 
his humour. But no single artist in the past, as 
far as we are aware, has, in any just proportion, 
combined them both. By the delicate quality 
of his art, by the alliance in his work of a sim- 
plicity and playfulness which has a kind of par- 
allel in Goldsmith's literary style, the late 
Randolph Caldecott seemed always to suggest 
that he could, if he would, supply this want. 
But, apart from the captivating play-book of the 
" Mad Dog," and a frontispiece in the "Parch- 
ment Library," Caldecott contributed nothing to 
the illustration of Goldsmith's novel.^ 

^ The foregoing paper, which appeared in the " Eng- 
lish Illustrated Magazine," for October, 1890, was after- 
wards reprinted as the Preface to Mr. Hugh Thomson's 
admirable illustrated edition of the " Vicar " (Macmillan, 
same year). 



y^i-ze r ]p3^ TMs Pa 




/z^^<?w^^^*^^r&*zi^^i/^AredTiced-Copy"o£FrsB:ErR's Gkottnt) Plain at^e Ro'z.jj^I- i 



B.TJie Rari of&a.e7t # . 



ILTheZirra Gtrrard 
i2T7ieXord Cro/h- 
23ThiZ<rTd Siloj-szj- 



2oJ7uZa' 
Zc.TTuCir. 

InJ.d ZimdoTi. Ihiiuhek of the ~4et drrtrtr. J\rcvemicr30. '• ■ 



^ZirXkeZcrd.Li7imfftimJ- ^f^^it^e ViSSTie CtfueTt::^ Tfardb-oie 




fJfsxTS'B^.ajLX.. taken ±a ttie Rei^ of Chari-es 2^1680. 



33. CoZoTieZ 2>anyr 
SS.Cajktcmt Cook 



TinlTiomas J>mSt^31,£artii J^eer^ast. OafrrJ ■Street. 



SlJoMTToK't 

SiToJKrZirle 

iSS.Jirl'aulJndie 

&itThjJSrnffjJ16me^iSi:'n/4i 

SS.ToJW:Eariy 

se.ToJ'ir -fll-fih^n. Fox 

srToJMTChinAili 



OLD WHITEHALL. 

NOW, when the widening of Parliament 
Street promises to afford an adequate 
approach to St. Stephen's, and another imposing 
range of buildings has arisen at Spring Gardens 
to match the Foreign and India Offices, it may 
be worth while to linger for a moment upon 
some former features of this much-changing 
locality. In such a retrospect, the Old Banquet- 
ing-House of Inigo Jones naturally becomes a 
prominent object. Its massive Northamptonshire 
stone and classic columns invest it with a dignity 
of which the towering pile of Whitehall Court 
can scarcely deprive it ; and it seems to overlook 
Kent's stumpy Horse Guards opposite much as 
a nobleman with a pedigree might be expected 
to survey a neighbour of a newer creation. 
And yet, impressive though it is, it represents 
but an insignificant portion of the architect's 
original design, the imaginative extent of which 
may be studied in Campbell's '^ Vitruvius Britan- 
nicus " and elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the 
present Banqueting-House was only one out of 



184 Miscellanies. 

four similar pavilions in a vast structure of 
which the ground plan would have extended 
from the river bank to a point far beyond the 
Horse Guards, and would have occupied all the 
space on either side of the road from Horse 
Guards Avenue to the Mews of Richmond 
Terrace. It included no fewer than seven 
splendid internal courts, and the fapades towards 
the park and the Thames — the latter especially 
— were of great beauty. But the scheme was 
beyond the pocket of the first James, for whom, 
in 1619, it was designed ; and a cheaper modifi- 
cation, reaching only to the roadway, and pre- 
pared twenty years later, fared no better with 
Charles I. The Banqueting-House, which was 
built in 1619-22, and is common to both schemes, 
is consequently all that was ever executed of 
what, in its completed form, would have been 
a palace among palaces, surpassing the Louvre 
and the Escurial. 

Apart from its existing employment as a mili- 
tary museum,^ the Banqueting-House to-day 
serves chiefly as a landmark or key by help of 
which its ancient environments may be mentally 
re-constructed. With Gibbons' fine bronze statue 
of James H., now erected in the enclosure at 

1 I.e., that of the Royal United Service Institution. 



Old Whitehall. 185 

the side of Gwydyr House, ^ it practically con- 
stitutes the sole surviving portion of Old White- 
hall as it appears in John Fisher's famous 
"Survey and Ground-Plot" of 1680; 2 and 
about it was dispersed irregularly that pell-mell 
of buildings dating from Henry VIII. and 
Elizabeth, which, in Jacobean and Caroline days, 
was known as "our Palace of Westminster." 
Roughly speaking, this aggregation might be 
defined geographically as bounded on the north ^ 
by St. James's Park ; on the south by the 
Thames ; to the east by Scotland Yard and 
Spring Gardens, and to the west by Richmond 
Terrace Mews. It was traversed throughout 
its entire extent by the old roadway leading 
to Westminster Abbey, and this divided it into 
two portions, the larger and more important of 
which lay on the side of the Thames. From 
Scotland Yard to the Banqueting-House the 
road was fairly wide and open ; but at the west- 
ern end of the Banqueting-House it suddenly 
narrowed, passing through the gate popularly 

1 This originally stood at the back of the Banqueting- 
House in Whitehall Gardens; but was moved to its 
present site in 1897. 

2 There are anachronisms which seem to indicate an 
earlier date. 

3 By " north," *' south," etc., the north and south of 
Fisher's plan are here intended. 



1 86 Miscellanies. 

known as Holbein's, and afterwards entering 
King Street through a second or King Street 
Gate. '* K[ing] Cha[rles]," the Marquis of Nor- 
manby told Evelyn, ^' had a designe to buy 
all King Street, and build it nobly, it being 
the streete leading to Westm'/' Once, too, 
when Evelyn had presented him with a copy 
of his " book of Architecture," he sketched a 
rough plan for the future building of Whitehall 
itself, " together with the roomes of state, and 
other particulars." But His Majesty's promises 
were better than his performances ; and he had 
more pressing and less worshipful ways of 
spending his money. 

It will be convenient to speak first of that 
part of the palace buildings which lay to the 
north of King Street and the road to Charing 
Cross. Here was the old Cockpit, which, in 
the time of Fisher's Plan, was included in the 
apartments of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and 
from which the Earl of Pembroke and Mont- 
gomery saw the first Charles walk from St. 
James's Palace to the scaffold. Later it became 
the Privy-Council Office, where, in Anne's reign, 
Harley was stabbed by Guiscard. Here also 
was the Tennis Court ; and (fronting the Ban- 
queting-House) the Tilt-Yard, where with such 
" laudable Courtesy and pardonable Insolence," 



Old Whitehall. 187 

Sir Roger de Coverley's ancestor defeated his 
opponent.^ On the site of the present Treasury, 
and looking upon the street, were the apart- 
ments of the Dukes of Monmouth and Ormond ; 
to the left of these, the quarters of Captain 
Henry Cooke, ^' Master of the Children [choir 
boys] of the Chapel Royal." The remainder of 
the buildings on this side seem to have been 
chiefly occupied by Albemarle, though the 
Duchess of Cleveland had kitchens near the 
Tennis Court, while between the Horse Guard 
Yard and the Spring Garden were the rooms 
of one of the maids of honour, Mrs. Kirk, 
under whose auspices took place some of 
those lively and scandalous petits soupers, of 
which record is to be found in the veracious 
pages of Anthony Hamilton. At the back of all 
these buildings stretched St. James's Park, 
where Charles H. made many improvements, 
and built his famous decoy for waterfowl. In 
Evelyn's days this must have almost attained 
the proportions of a menagerie. " Here," says 
he, "was a curious sort of poultry not much 
exceeding the size of a tame pidgeon, with legs 
so short as their crops seem'd to touch y^ earth ; 
a milk-white raven ; a stork which was a rarity 
at this season, seeing he was loose and could 
1 Spectator ^ No. 109. 



1 88 Miscellanies. 

flie loftily ; two Balearian [Balearic ?] cranes, one 
of which having one of his leggs broken and cut 
off above the knee, had a wooden or boxen leg 
and thigh, with a joynt so accurately made that 
y® creature could walke and use it as well as 
if it had ben natural ; it was made by a souldier. 
The parke was at this time stored with numerous 
flocks of severall sorts of ordinary and extra- 
ordinary wild fowle, breeding about the Decoy, 
which for being neere so greate a citty, and 
among such a concourse of souldiers and people, 
is a singular and diverting thing. There were 
also deere of severall countries, white ; spotted 
like leopards ; antelopes, an elk, red deere, 
roebucks, staggs, Guinea goates, Arabian 
sheepe, &c. There were withy-potts or nests 
for the wild fowle to lay their eggs in, a little 
above y^ surface of y^ water." ^ 

Thus we come to that larger and more im- 
portant portion of Old Whitehall which lay to 
the south of the road between Westminster and 
Charing Cross. To the west of the Banquet- 
ing- House, and corresponding in width to the 
distance between the two great gates, was the 
Privy Garden, where in May, 1662, Mr. Pepys, 
to his great solace and content, saw my Lady 
Castlemaine's laced smocks and linen petticoats 

1 " Memoirs of John Evelyn," etc., 1827, ii. 234. 



Old Whitehall, 189 

floating gaily to the breeze. According to Hat- 
ton, the Privy Garden occupied about three and 
a quarter acres, and (as the plan shows) was laid 
out in sixteen grass-plots with statues in the 
centre of each. To the north a wall separated 
it from the roadway, to the west was a line of 
trees, and to the east a straggling range of build- 
ings nearly at right angles to the Banqueting- 
House. Here lived Evelyn's friend. Sir Robert 
Murray; and here were the apartments of the 
Lord Chamberlain, where, in November, 1679, 
Evelyn witnessed the re-marriage of his Lord- 
ship's daughter, a child of twelve years old, to 
the Duke of Grafton, the king's natural son by 
Barbara Palmer. Here, again, were the Council 
Office, the Lord Keeper's Office, and the Treas- 
ury. Opposite the Treasury, in the central walk 
of the garden, was a famous dial, which had 
been set up in James's reign, but had fallen into 
ruin in that of his grandson. By King James's 
order it was fully described in a quarto pub- 
lished in 1624, by one Edmund Gunter, and it 
was of it that Andrew Marvell wrote the bitter 
lines : — 

" This place for a dial was too insecure, 

Since a guard and a garden could not it defend ; 
For so near to the Court they will never endure 
Any witness to show how their time they mispend." 



190 Miscellanies. 

To the south of the Privy Garden, and com- 
municating with the Bov\^ling Green, which lay 
to the west of it (presumably on the site now 
occupied by Richmond Terrace), was the fa- 
mous Stone Gallery. On its northern side were 
domiciled the Earl of Lauderdale, Lord Peter- 
borough, Prince Rupert, and Mr. Hyde ; and 
somewhere in its vicinity, although not indicated 
upon Fisher's plan, doubtless because granted 
subsequently to the date of its execution, must 
have been the " luxuriously-furnished" lodgings 
of that " baby-faced " (but not guileless) Breton 
beauty, Louise Ren^e de Keroualle. This, in- 
deed, is clear from Evelyn's diary. ''4* Oct. 
[1683] . . . Following his Majesty this morn- 
ing thro' the gallerie, I went, with the few who at- 
tended him, into the Dutchesse of Portsmouth's ^ 
dressing-roome within her bed-chamber, where 
she was in her morning loose garment, her 
maids combing her, newly out of her bed, his 
Maty and the gallants standing about her; but 
that which engag'd my curiosity was the rich 
and splendid furniture of this woman's apart- 
ment, now twice or thrice pull'd down and re- 
built to satisfie her prodigal and expensive pleas- 
ures, whilst her Ma^ys ^loes not exceede some 

1 From an autograph in the French National Archives, 
she signed herself " L duchesse de Portsmout." 



Old Whitehall. 191 

gentlemen's ladies in furniture and accommoda- 
tion. Here I saw the new fabriq of French 
tapissry, for designe, tenderness of worke, and 
incomparable imitation of the best paintings, be- 
yond anything I had ever beheld. Some pieces 
had Versailles, St. Germain's and other palaces 
of the French King, with huntings, figures and 
landskips, exotiq fowls, and all to the life rarely 
don. Then for Japan cabinets, screenes, pen- 
dule clocks, greate vases of wrought plate, 
tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, 
branches, braseras, &c. all of massie silver, and 
out of number, besides some of her Ma^y^ \^q^i 
paintings." " 10 April [1691]. This night a 
sudden and terrible fire burnt down all the build- 
ings over the stone gallery at White-hall to the 
water-side, beginning at the apartment of the 
late Dutchesse of Portsmouth ^ (w^h had ben 
puird down and rebuilt no lesse than three 
times to please her)." 

Between the Stone Gallery and the old river- 
line, now obliterated by the Embankment, and 
covering a site which extended as far as White- 
hall Palace Stairs, were the apartments of the 
King, the Queen, the Duke of York, and the 

1 What Evelyn intends by " late " is not clear, as the 
Duchess did not die until 1734. Probably he only means 
that she had withdrawn to France. 



1 92 Miscellanies. 

great officers of the Court. The King's rooms, 
in suggestive proximity to those of the Maids of 
Honour, and with the notorious Chiffinch con- 
veniently at hand, were to the left of the Privy 
Stairs ; those of Catherine of Braganza, which, 
on the plan, look small and unimportant, lay to 
the right. Neither Pepys nor Evelyn gives us 
much information with regard to this part of 
the Palace. Mention is indeed made by them 
and others of the Shield Gallery, the Matted 
Gallery, the Boarded Gallery, the Vane Room, 
the Robe Chamber, the Green Chamber, the 
Theatre, the Adam and Eve Gallery (which 
took its name from a picture by Mabuse), 
and so forth ; but the indications are too 
vague to enable us to fix their locality with 
certainty. By favour, however, of " an ancient 
woman who made these lodgings cleane, and 
had all y^ keys/' Evelyn seems to have minutely 
examined the King's private library, with which, 
though he spent three or four days over it, he 
was not greatly impressed. " I went," he says, 
*'with expectation of finding some curiosities, 
but though there were about 1000 volumes, there 
were few of importance which I had notperus'd 
before." He found, nevertheless, a folio MS. 
containing the school exercises of Edward VI., 
together with his Journal, which Burnet after- 



Old Whitehall. 193 

wards made use of in his '^ History of the Refor- 
mation." ^ Towards Whitehall Stairs, between 
the Banqueting-House and the river, were the 
Great Hall, and the Chapel where King of Chi- 
chester, and the witty South, and the eloquent 
Stillingfleet preached to a unedified congregation, 
and where inquisitive Mr. Pepys " observed," 
on a certain Sunday in October, 1660, "how 
the Duke of York and Mrs. Palmer did talk to 
one another very wantonly through the hangings 
that parts the King's closet and the closet where 
the ladies sit." An old view of Whitehall, from 
the Thames, gives a fair idea of its aspect at this 
time. To the right are the Chapel and Hall, with 
the loftier Banqueting-House appearing above 
them, and Holbein's gate just distinguishable at 
its side. To the left is the covered Privy Stairs, 
whence the Royal Barge with its flags and 
trumpeters is just putting off. Here it must 
have been, that, little more than two months be- 
fore Charles, n.'s unexpected death, Evelyn 
witnessed the water celebration which took 
place in front of the Queen's apartments : — 
"[Nov.] 15, [1684] Being the Queene's birth- 
day, there were fire-works on the Thames be- 
fore White-hall, with pageants of castles, forts, 
and other devices of gyrandolas, serpents, the 
1 " Memoirs o£ John Evelyn," etc., 1827, iii. 33-35. 
13 



194 Miscellanies. 

King and Queene's armes and mottos, all repre- 
sented in fire, such as had not ben seen here. 
But the most remarkable was the several fires 
and skirmishes in the very water, which actually 
mov'd a long way, burning under the water, 
now and then appearing above it, giving reports 
like muskets and cannon, with granados and in- 
numerable other devices. It is said it cost 
;£i,^oo. It was concluded with a ball, where 
all the young ladys and gallants daunced in the 
greate hall. The court had not ben seene so 
brave and rich in apparell since his Ma^ys re- 
stauration." ^ To this may succeed that memo- 
rable and oft-cited entry, which occurs only a 
few pages farther on, when Charles was lying 
dead : " I can never forget the inexpressible 
luxury and prophanenesse, gaming and all disso- 
luteness, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of 
God (it being Sunday evening) which this day 
se'nnight [25 January, 1685] I was witnesse of, 
the King sitting and toying with his concubines, 
Portsmouth, Cleaveland and Mazarine, &c., a 
French boy [Frangois Duperrier] singing love 
songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about 20 
of the greate courtiers and other dissolute per- 
sons were at basset round a large table, a bank 
of at least 2,000 in gold before them, upon which 
1 " Memoirs of John Evelyn," etc., 1827, iii. 121-2. 



Old Whitehall. 195 

two gentlemen who were with me made reflex- 
ions with astonishment. Six days after was all 
in the dust I " The next three lines with their 
note of official anti-climax are not so generally 
reprinted : — " It was enjoyn'd that those who 
put on mourning should wear it as for a father, 
in ye most solemn manner." 

From Whitehall Palace Stairs a roadway 
went, past the Chapel and Great Hall, through 
a wide open court to the Palace Gate, close to 
what was the site of the old Wardrobe (after- 
wards Lord Carrington's). To the right of this 
road, and extending as far as Scotland Yard, 
were groups of inferior buildings and offices, — 
kitchens, butteries, pastries, spiceries, bake- 
houses, slaughter-houses, charcoal-houses, and 
the like, — traces of which may still be identified. 
The present Board of Trade, and the adjacent 
buildings in Horse Guards Avenue, occupy por- 
tions of the sites of the Wine-Cellar, Hall, and 
Chapel ; the Confectionary is said to have been 
a white house between the former Museum of 
the United Service Institution and Lord Car- 
rington's stables, and the old Beer Buttery long 
existed near the gates of Fife House, the place 
of which is now covered by part of Whitehall 
Court. 

Standing in the entrance to Horse Guards 



196 Miscellanies. 

Avenue (once Whitehall Yard), one may still, 
with the aid of an old view or two, and Fisher's 
indispensable plan, obtain a fair idea of the place 
in the time of the Stuarts. Opposite — where 
the Scottish Office and Horse Guards are at 
present — was the boundary wall of the old Tilt 
and Horse Guard Yards. To the left, imme- 
diately in front of the Banqueting-House, ex- 
tended a row of posts, a little in advance of 
which — '* in the open street before Whitehall " 
— was the spot where, after much controversy, 
Charles I. is now allowed to have been be- 
headed. At right angles to the facade a line 
of buildings ran out to Whitehall Gate. These, 
which also looked into the Privy Garden, were, 
as already explained, the apartments of Lord 
Arlington, the Lord Chamberlain. Of Whitehall 
Gate itself, — for, according to Mr. Wornum, 
we are scarcely justified in styling it Hol- 
bein's, — Pennant, who seems to have seen it, 
gives the following account: — "To Holbein 
was owing the most beautiful gate at Whitehall, 
built with bricks of two colours, glazed, and 
disposed in a tesselated fashion. The top, as 
well as that of an elegant tower on each side, 
were [sic] embattled. On each front were four 
busts in baked clay, which resisted to the last 
every attack of the weather: possibly the arti- 



Old Whitehall. 197 

ficial stone revived in this century. These, I 
have been lately informed, are preserved in a 
private hand. This charming structure fell a 
sacrifice to conveniency within my memory : 
as did another in 1723, built at the same time, 
but of far inferior beauty. The last blocked 
up the road to King's-Street, and was called 
King's-Gate. Henry built it as a passage to 
the park, the tennis court, bowling-green, the 
cock-pit, and tilting-yard; for he was extremely 
fond of athletic exercises ; they suited his 
strength and his temper."^ 

Both these gates were engraved by Vertue in 
the ** Vetusta Monumenta " published by the 
Society of Antiquaries. The so-called Hol- 
bein's Gate, which long survived the buildings 
that connected it with the Banqueting-House, 
was pulled down in August, 17^9, to make room 
for Parliament Street. The Duke of Cumber- 
land had it removed to Windsor, with the inten- 
tion of re-erecting it at the top of the Long 
Walk, and his Deputy Ranger, Thomas Sandby 
(the architect), was to have made some addi- 
tions at the sides, the designs for which are still 
to be seen in J. T. Smith's "Westminster." 
But, as seems generally the case after removals 
of this kind, nothing was ever done in the mat- 

^ " Some Account of London," 3d ed., 1793, pp. 99, 100. 



198 Miscellanies. 

ter. Meanwhile the medallions of which Pen- 
nant speaks were dispersed. Three of them, 
according to Smith, were, when he published 
his book, at Hatfield Peverell in Essex ; two 
more got worked into keepers' lodges at Wind- 
sor. These, said Cunningham in 1849, " are 
now, by Mr. Jesse's [i. e. the late J. Heneage 
Jesse's] exertions, at Hampton Court, where 
they are made to do duty as two of the Roman 
Emperors, described by Hentzner, in his Travels, 
as then at Hampton Court." They are of Italian 
workmanship, and may probably be attributed to 
John de Maiano. 

Those who^ having sufficiently examined the 
Palladian exterior of the Banqueting- House, 
and duly noted the famous weather-cock on the 
eastern end, which James H. is said to have set 
up to warn him of the approach of the Dutch 
fleet, desire farther to inspect the interior, can 
easily do so, since (as already stated) the build- 
ing is now a museum. Its chief feature of 
interest is the ceiling, which represents the 
apotheosis of James I. It is painted black, 
partly gilded, and divided into panels by bands, 
ornamented with a guilloche. Of the three 
central compartments, that at one end repre- 
sents the British Solomon on his throne, ''point- 
ing to Prince Charles, who is being perfected 



Old Whitehall. 199 

by Wisdom." The middle compartment shows 
him " trampling on the globe and flying on the 
wings of Justice (an eagle) to heaven." In the 
third he is '' embracing Minerva, and routing 
Rebellion and Envy." These panels, and others 
at the sides, were painted by Rubens in 1635, 
with the assistance of Jordaens. They were 
restored by Cipriani. In 1837, the whole build- 
ing, which had been closed since 1829, was 
refitted and repaired under the direction of Sir 
Robert Smirke. 

It would occupy too large a space to trace 
the history of the Banqueting-House from its 
first erection to its Georgian transformation into 
an unconsecrated chapel, seductive as it might 
be to speak of it as the theatre of Ben Jonson's 
masques and the buffooneries of Cromwell. In 
Charles II.'s time, to which, in the foregoing 
remarks, we have mainly confined ourselves, it 
was the scene of many impressive ceremonies 
and state receptions. It was in the Banqueting- 
House that Charles begged his Honourable 
House of Commons to amend the ways about 
Whitehall, so that Catherine of Braganza might 
not upon her arrival find it " surrounded by 
water;" it was in the Banqueting-House that 
he gravely went through that half solemn half 
ludicrous business of touching for the evil ; it 



200 Miscellanies. 

was in the Banqueting-House that, coming from 
the Tower of London with a splendid cavalcade, 
he created at one time six Earls and six Barons. 
Under its storied roof he magnificently enter- 
tained the French Ambassador, Charles Colbert, 
Marquis de Croissy, on which occasion he pre- 
sented Mr. Evelyn, from his own royal plate, with 
a piece of that newly-imported Barbadian luxury, 
the King-pine ; ^ it was here also that he re- 
ceived the Russian Ambassador with his pres- 
ents of " tapissry " and sables, and the swarthy 
envoys from Morocco, with their scymetars and 
white alhagas, and their lions and "estridges " 
[ostriches] . But perhaps the brightest and most 
vivid page in connection with this famous old 
building is that in which Samuel Pepys relates 
what he saw from its roof on the 23rd of 
August 1662: — 

" . . Mr. Creed . . and I . . walked down 
to the Styllyard [Steel Yard] and so all along 
Thames-street, but could not get a boat : I 
offered eight shillings for a boat to attend me this 

1 In the Breakfast Room at Strawberry Hill, Horace 
Walpole had a picture representing Rose, the Royal 
gardener, in the act of presenting to Charles II. the first 
pineapple raised in England. It (the painting) was at- 
tributed to Danckers ; and had belonged to a descendant 
of one of the firm of London and Wise, Nursery-men, 
mentioned in the fifth number of the Spectator. 



Old Whitehall. 201 

afternoon, and they would not, it being the day 
of the Queen's coming to town from Hampton 
Court. So we fairly walked it to White Hall, 
and through my Lord's [ Lord Sandwich's] lodg- 
ings we got into White Hall garden, and so to 
the Bowling-green, and up to the top of the new 
Banqueting-House-^ there, over the Thames, 
which was a most pleasant place as any I could 
have got ; and all the show consisted chiefly in 
the number of boats and barges ; and two pag- 
eants, one of a King, and another of a Queen, 
with her Maydes of Honour sitting at her feet 
very prettily ; and they tell me the Queen is Sir 
Richard Ford's daughter. Anon come the King 
and Queen in a barge under a canopy with 
10,000 barges and boats, I think, for we could 
see no water for them, nor discern the King nor 
Queen. And so they landed at White Hall 
Bridge [Privy Stairs] and the great guns on the 
other side went off. But that which pleased me 
best was, that my Lady Castlemaine stood over 
against us upon a piece of White Hall, where I 
glutted myself with looking on her. But me- 
thought it was strange to see her Lord and her 
upon the same place walking up and down with- 

1 No doubt still so called by habit, as it succeeded to an 
earlier Banqueting-House which was burnt in January, 
1619. 



202 Miscellanies. 

out taking notice one of another, only at first 
entry he put off his hat, and she made him a very 
civil salute, but afterwards took no notice one of 
another ; but both of them now and then would 
take their child, which the nurse held in her 
armes, and dandle it. One thing more ; there 
happened a scaffold below to fall, and we feared 
some hurt, but there was none, but she of all the 
great ladies only run down among the common 
rabble to see what hurt was done, and did take 
care of a child that received some little hurt, 
which methought was so noble. Anon there 
came one there booted and spurred that she 
talked long with. And by and by, she being in 
her hair, she put on his hat, which was but an 
ordinary one, to keep the wind off. But me- 
thinks it became her mightily, as every thing 
else do.'' ^ 

Evelyn's last entry respecting the old palace 
is as follows: "2 [4?] Jan, [1698]. . . . 
White-hall burnt, nothing but walls and ruins 
left." Thus it comes about that the Banquet- 
ing-House (which^ notwithstanding the above, 
escaped), besides being the sole relic of a never- 
existent Whitehall, is also the sole relic of the 
Whitehall that was. 

1 Pepys' "Diary," by Wheatley, ii (1893), 3i^» 3^7- 



LUTTRELUS " LETTERS TO JULIA." 

NOTHING ('tis a melancholy truism) fades 
with such rapidity as the reputation of the 
mere favourite of society. If he be a dandy 
his name, perhaps, may linger here and there in 
the circular of a fashionable tailor ; if a wit, 
his sayings, although — like those of Praed's 
Belle — "extremely quoted" during his life- 
time, scarcely survive his contemporaries and 
boon-companions. It may be that he secures 
to himself some notice from posterity by posthu- 
mous '* Memoirs" put together by a friend — 
perhaps a valet ; or he may leave behind him 
some literary legacy which now and then is 
disinterred from the shelves of the British 
Museum Library (if, indeed, it has found an 
asylum there) by an enquirer curious in forgot- 
ten follies, or anxious to elucidate the carica- 
tures of Gillray and " H3." But, as a rule, if 
he does not die early, he passes " into the line 
of outworn faces," and his place knows him no 
more. Only from a magazine obituary, or a 
stray paragraph in a provincial paper, does one 



204 Miscellanies. 

learn, half-a-century afterwards, that an old vale- 
tudinarian has died at Bath, or Cheltenham, or 
Boulogne, who, in his earlier days, was a favourite 
with the Prince Regent, a well-known habitat 
of Brooks's and White's, a member of the Nea- 
politan Club, and a frequent figure at Crock- 
ford's. These remarks, applicable, it should 
be observed, more exactly to the Georgian than 
the Victorian era, are mainly prompted by the 
difficulty experienced in obtaining particulars 
respecting the career of the once-famous wit 
and writer of vers de socidU, whose chief work 
forms the subject of this paper. Yet, if we 
may trust a manuscript note in our copy of the 
" Letters to Julia," the author of that book and 
*' Crockford House" attained the ripe age of 
eighty-six ; and seventy years ago no one was 
better known in the higher classes of society 
as — to use a phrase which would have been 
employed in the days when "Pelham" was 
penned — - a man of the world dii meilleur crd. 
The friend of Jekyll and Lord Alvanley, of 
Mackintosh and Sydney Smith, of Lord Hol- 
land and Jeffery, of Greville, of Moore, of 
Rogers ; a wit with the wits, a scholar with the 
scholars ; fairly earning a hearing, even in those 
days of " Whistlecraft " burlesques and " Two- 
penny Postboys," as a writer of sparkling verse ; 



LuttrelVs '^Letters to Julia.'' 205 

an admirable talker and a polished gentleman — 
Henry Luttrell must have been one of the 
most delightful of social companions. Yet, 
secluded in those inner circles to which admis- 
sion was as difficult as getting on the list of 
" Almack's," he lies entirely beyond the range 
of the ordinary life-taker ; and the few refer- 
ences to his character and works are only to be 
found sparsely scattered through the pages of 
contemporary, and, alas I often unindexed " me- 
moirs." In Lady Holland's life of Sydney 
Smith, for example, there are some brief refer- 
ences to his lightness of hand, his willingness 
to be pleased, his amusing Irish stories. " Lut- 
trell," says Smith, warning Lady Davy against 
overlooking the difficulties and embarrassments 
of life, '' before I taught him better, imagined 
muffins grew. He was wholly ignorant of all 
the intermediate processes of sowing, reaping, 
grinding, kneading, and baking." This is not 
much of a contribution to a portrait, no doubt ; 
but it affords a hint of that sublime and gen- 
erally affected indifference to the homelier phe- 
nomena of life which forms an indispensable 
part of the equipment of the man of the world, — 
du meilleur crii. Yet, although we find Rogers 
regretting his attachment to, and monopoly by, 
"persons of mere fashion," Luttrell, it is only 



2o6 Miscellanies. 

fair to infer, must have been considerably more 
than this. Everywhere, by happy allusion, and 
fine turns of expression, his work shows an 
intimate knowledge of classic authors ; and, as 
might be anticipated, of Horace in particular. 

"Tickler," in the " Noctes Ambrosianas," 
calls him " one of the most accomplished men 
in all England — a wit and a scholar." "Of 
course you know Luttrell," said Byron to Lady 
Blessington ; *' he is the best sayer of good 
things, and the most epigrammatic conversa- 
tionist I ever met. There is a terseness and 
wit, mingled with fancy, in his observations that 
no one else possesses, and no one so peculiarly 
understands the apropos. Then, unlike all, or 
most other wits, Luttrell is never obtrusive ; even 
the choicest bons mots are only brought forth 
when perfectly applicable, and they are given in 
a tone of good breeding which enhances their 
value." " None of the talkers whom I meet 
in London society," says Rogers, ^' can slide 
in a brilliant thing with such readiness as he 
does." The impression here given is rather 
of a wit than a humourist; there is more in it 
of Chamfort or Rivarol than Thackeray or Syd- 
ney Smith ; but, in default of more definite 
information, it enables us to form an idea of the 
easy, fluent causeur, touching all topics lightly, 



LuttreWs '' Letters to Julia,'' 507 

quick to catch the fleeting fancy and crystallise 
it into an epigram, to turn a dull corner with an 
adroit quotation from the classics (such things 
were possible formerly), to light up a mediocre 
story with a happy setting ; — able and ready, 
in short, to give that sparkling ripple to the flow 
of conversation which made the gifted possessor 
of these rare qualities the envy of diners-out, 
and the delight of hostesses. The more con- 
ventional type of such a character Luttrell has 
himself sketched in easy octosyllabics : — 

How much at home was Charles in all 
The talk aforesaid — nicknamed sma/^ ! 
Never embarrassed, seldom slow, 
His maxim always " touch and go." 
Chanced he to falter ? A grimace 
Was ready in the proper place ; 
Or a chased snuff-box, with its gems 
And gold, to mask his has and hems, 
Was offered round, and duly rapped. 
Till a fresh topic could be tapped. 
What if his envious rivals swore 
'Twas jargon all, and he a bore ? 
The surly sentence was outvoted, 
His jokes retailed, his jargon quoted ; 
And while he sneered or quizzed or flirted, 
The world, half-angry, was diverted. 

It would be of no service to reproduce here 
any of the half-dozen good things of Luttrell that 



2o8 Miscellanies. 

linger in Moore's ** Diary." Many of these 
are of that class whose prosperity lies emphat- 
ically in the ear of the listener ; and we are too 
far removed from the speaker to be able to 
revive those niceties of manner and delivery 
which were essential to a just appreciation of 
them. With his verse the case is different. 
That, at least, was intended to be read ; and 
although some of the allusions are necessarily 
obscure, we can, by a slight effort, place our- 
selves in the position of the audience to whom 
it was originally addressed. We must frankly 
confess, however, that, doubtless from the ab- 
sence of those individual advantages of address 
and opportunity which gave him grace as a con- 
versationalist, LuttrelFs work, easy and polished 
though it be, scarcely impresses one as com- 
mensurate with the praise he received from his 
contemporaries. But of this the reader must 
judge from the specimens here reproduced. 

The "Letters to Julia," ^ LuttrelFs longest 
and most ambitious effort, is an amplification of 

1 In the first edition of the poem, issued in 1820, it 
bore the title of "Advice to Julia," and the lady ad- 
dressed corresponded more exactly with the Lydia of 
Horace. But we are dealing with the later edition 
of 1822, published under the title we quote above, and 
in this we are told that " the first Julia must be forgiven 
and forgotten." 



LuttreWs '' Letters to Julia.'' 209 

that pleasant little ode in the first book of 
Horace, in which Lydia is enjoined by the poet 
not to ruin Sybaris by a too exclusive attach- 
ment to her apron-strings. The reader who 
recalls the sixteen lines of the original, may 
perhaps wonder how it was possible to expand 
so brief a lyric into a poem of two hundred 
pages. And, indeed, under the digressions of 
the author, the primary motive almost entirely 
disappears. But as he himself gives us the 
above explanation of the origin of his work, we 
are bound to regard it. His first conception, 
he says, was " by filling up such an outline on 
a wider canvas, to exhibit a picture, if imperfect 
not unfaithful, of modern habits and manners, 
and of the amusements and lighter occupations 
of the higher classes of society in England." 

Viewed in this aspect, it matters little how 
the idea was first suggested. In the four epis- 
tles of which the book consists, the parts of 
Lydia and Sybaris are taken by Charles, a man 
of fashion and pleasure, embarrassed, as a mat- 
ter of course, but " at the head of the supreme 
bon ton ; " and Julia, a young widow of two-and- 
twenty, rather lower in the social scale, but rich 
and spoiled by flattery, who quite intends to 
marry her desirable admirer whenever it suits 
her to do so, but in the meantime subjects him to 
14 



210 Miscellanies. 

all the petty tyrannies of coquetry and caprice. 
The writer of the letters is a cousin of the lady, 
who undertakes to remonstrate with her upon 
her harsh treatment of her lover. In this task, 
thanks to numberless digressions, he manages 
to ramble from " Almack's" to Newmarket, 
from Brighton to Paris — where you will — 
sketching lightly picture after picture of the 
fashionable life of the first quarter of the cen- 
tury. Now he amplifies cur vital olivum into 
a score of lines, descriptive of his recreant 
hero's avoidance of Moulsey and the Fives 
Court; of — 

— rubbing, racing and raw meat ; 
now mourns that no longer — 

with pliant arm he stems 
The tide or current of the Thames ; 

now laments his abdication of his proud suprem- 
acy as a dresser, and master of the awful 
mysteries of the Cravat of our grandfathers. 
Readers will recall the anecdote of Brummell's 
tray-full of failures in the following : 

Yet weak, he felt, were the attacks 
Of his voluminous Cossacks ; ^ 

1 Those trowsers named from the barbarians 
Nursed in the Steppes — the Crim-Tartarians, 
Who, when they scour a country, under 
Those ample folds conceal their plunder. 



LuttreWs ^^ Letters Jo Julia.'' 

In vain to suffocation braced 
And bandaged was his wasp-like waist ; 
In vain his buckram-wadded shoulders 
And chest astonished all beholders ; 
Wear any coat he might, 'twas fruitless; 
Those shoes, those very boots were bootless 
Whose tops ('twas he enjoined the mixture) 
Are moveable, and spurs a fixture ; 
All was unprofitable, flat, 
And stale without a smart Cravat, 
Muslined enough to hold its starch ; 
That last key-stone of Fashion's arch ! 

" Have you, my friend," I 've heard him say, 

" Been lucky in your turns to-day ? — 

Think not that what I ask alludes 

To Fortune's stale vicissitudes. 

Or that I 'm driven horn, you to learn 

How cards, and dice, and women turn, 

And what prodigious contributions 

They levy, in their revolutions : 

I ask not if, in times so critical. 

You 've managed well your turns political, 

Knowing your aptitude to rat. 

My question points to — your Cravat. 

These are the only turns I mean. 

Tell me if these have lucky been 1 

How strange their destiny has been ! 
Promoted, since the year fifteen, 
In honour of these fierce allies. 
To grace our British legs and thighs. 
But fashion's tide no barrier stems ; 
So the Don mingles with the Thames ! 



2 1 2 Miscellanies. 

If round your neck, in every fold 
Exact, the muslin has been rolled, 
And, dexterously in front confined, 
Preserved the proper set behind ; 
In short, by dint of hand and eye, 
Have you achieved a perfect tie ? 

" Should yours (kind heaven, avert the omen ! ) 

Like the cravats of vulgar, low men. 

Asunder start — and, yawning wide, 

Disclose a chasm on either side ; 

Or should it stubbornly persist, 

To take some awkward tasteless twist. 

Some crease indelible, and look 

Just like a dunce's dog's-eared book, 

How would you parry the disgrace ? 

In what assembly show your face ? 

How brook your rival's scornful glance, 

Or partner's titter in the dance ? 

How in the morning dare to meet 

The quizzers of the park or street ? 

Your occupation 's gone, — in vain 

Hope to dine out, or flirt again. 

The Ladies from their lists will put you ! 

And even /, my friend, must cut you ! " 

This is a good sample of Luttrell's lighter man- 
ner. Here is another — a wail from ' ' Almack's " 
over the substitution of tea for supper : — 

" How niggardly," they cry, " to stoop 
To paltry black and green from soup ! 
Once, every novice could obtain 
A hearing over iced Champagne, 



LuttrelVs ^^ Letters to Julia.'' 213 

And claret, ev'n of second growth, 
Gave credit to an amorous oath. 
But now, such lifeless love is made 
On cakes, orgeat, and lemonade, 
That hungry women grow unkind, 
And men too faint to speak their mind. 
Tea mars all mirth, makes evenings drag, 
And talk grow flat, and courtship flag ; 
Tea, mawkish beverage, is the reason 
Why fifty flirtings in a season 
Swell with ten marriages, at most. 
The columns of the Morning-Post." 

We might easily multiply extracts of this kind. 
And jaunty and fluent as are the above passages, 
there are others which suggest that the author 
had a first-rate talent for natural description and 
quiet landscape, points which here and there 
seem to rise above his pictures of men and 
women — or rather, belles and exquisites. Here 
is a picture of a storm in the Park, which is 
close and effective, and quite as truthful in its 
realism as Swift's " City Shower": — 

How suddenly the day 's obscured ! 

Bless me, how dark ! — Thou threatening cloud. 

Pity the un-imibrellcOd crowd. 

The cloud rolls onward with the breeze. 

First, pattering on the distant trees 

The rain-drops fall — then quicker, denser, 

On many a parasol and spencer ; 

Soon drenching, with no mercy on it. 

The straw and silk of many a bonnet. 



214 Miscellanies. 

Think of their hapless owners fretting, 
"While feathers, crape, and gauze are wetting 1 
Think of the pang to well-dressed girls, 
When, pinched in vain, their hair uncurls, 
And ringlets from each lovely pate 
Hang mathematically straight ! 
As off, on every side, they scour, 
Still beats the persecuting shower, 
Till, on the thirsty gravel smoking. 
It fairly earns the name of soaking. 
Breathless they scud ; some helter-skelter 
To carriages, and some for shelter ; 
Lisping to coachmen drunk or dumb 
In numbers — while no numbers come. 

And what dweller in London will not recog- 
nise the accuracy of this : — 

Have you not seen (you must remember ) 

A fog in London — time, November "i 

That non-descript elsewhere, and grown 

In our congenial soil alone ? 

First, at the dawn of lingering day 

It rises, of an ashen grey, 

Then, deepening with a sordid stain 

Of yellow, like a lion's mane, 

Vapour importunate and dense. 

It wars at once with every sense. 

Invades the eyes, is tasted, smelt. 

And, like Egyptian darkness, felt. 

The ears escape not. All around 

Returns a dull unwonted sound. 

Loth to stand still, afraid to stir, 

The chilled and puzzled passenger, 



LuttrelUs ''Letters to Julia/' 215 

Oft-blundering from the pavement, fails 
To feel his way along the rails, 
Or, at the crossings, in the roll 
Of every carriage dreads its pole. 

Here again — in a picture of the Serpentine 
in winter — are some lines which to us appear 
to be thoroughly successful in their choice and 
economy of epithet : — 

What time the slanting wintry sun 
Just skirts th' horizon, and is gone ; 
When from his disk a short-lived glare 
Is wasted on the clear cold air ; 
When the snow sparkles, on the sight 
Flashing intolerable white ; 
And, swept by hurried feet, the ground 
Returns a crisp and crushing sound. 

The main defect of the " Letters to Julia'' is 
its length. One of the poet's contemporaries 
(Kenney, the creator of Jeremy Diddler) com- 
plained indeed, that, besides being too long, it 
was '* not broad enough ; " but with the absence 
of the latter dimension, we need not quarrel. In 
point of even execution, and that air of reticent 
good breeding which Byron declared to be 
characteristic of the author's style in speaking, 
little is wanting. The purpureas pannus is, in 
truth, carefully kept out of sight ; and yet, not- 
withstanding the strict observance of the Hora- 



2i6 Miscellanies. 

tian precept, there is a certain lack of colour and 
variety, which begets an impatient desire for 
discordance of some sort. One is reminded, in 
turning over the pages of faultlessly rhymed 
couplets, of that " Cymodoc^e " of Chateau- 
briand, in which there was not a single elision, 
and concerning which the irreverent said, — 
" Tant pis pour Cymodocie I " That the poem 
treats solely of trivial pursuits and amusements 
cannot justly be counted as a defect, since the 
author's intention was to depict the habits of 
the merely fashionable world. This his graver 
contemporaries fully recognised when they nick- 
named the book, " Letters from a Dandy to a 
Dolly." A less excusable fault is, that Luttrell 
nowhere opposes to his picture of frivolity any 
hint of higher or worthier employment ; nor is 
there, as in these days there assuredly would be if 
the theme were treated by a modern, any subtle 
indication of a graver side to the story, or any 
skilful suggestion as to the unreality of so- 
called pleasure as an object in life. But these 
differences are in some respects due to changed 
conditions of society, and altered points of 
view. We are sadder than our forefathers, 
and if we have no longer their hearty appetites, 
we are not so willingly grave that we do not 
occasionally envy them their high spirits. 



LuttrelVs ^^ Letters to Julia.'' 217 

Little room remains to speak of LuttrelFs 
lesser effort of *' Crockford House," even if it 
came within our scheme. The defect of tedi- 
ousness is more conspicuous in it than in the 
former work, although the motive — denun- 
ciation of the prevailing vice of Play — is a 
better one. But the author seems to have 
had a doubt about making it public, since, 
according to Moore, he consulted Lord Sef- 
ton, Mr. Greville, and others, as to the expe- 
diency of a man of the town publishing such 
an attack upon the high priest of the gam- 
ing table, — "a deference to society," says 
Moore (rather unexpectedly, considering his 
antecedents), " for which society will hardly 
thank him." With ''Crockford House" are 
printed some lines on Rome and the dirtiness of 
that Imperial City. A rhyming tour de force 
on " Burnham Beeches," and a I'ew more of 
Luttrell's fugitive verses are included in the 
late Mr. Locker Lampson's " Lyra Elegantia- 
rum," where is also to be found the admirable 
little epigram upon Miss Ellen Tree, which 
has already been reproduced in these pages. ^ 
Here, from the same collection, is a graver 
specimen : — 

1 See ante, " The Author of Monsieur Tonson." 



2i8 Miscellanies. 

" O Death, thy certainty is such, 
The thought of thee so fearful, 
That, musing, I have wondered much 
How men are ever cheerful." 

There is a compactness about this which 
makes us wish for some other brief examples of 
Luttrell's serious style. It is his plans that are 
long, not his art. If, instead of amplifying 
" Lydia, die per omnes," he had simply trans- 
lated it, or " Vixi puellis," or " Vitas hinnuleo," 
or any of the lighter of Horace's odes, we should 
have had nearly perfect versions, for no man 
could have done them better. 

We add one more of his lesser pieces, because 
the first lines alone are generally quoted. They 
are the quatrains to Moore about his '' Lallah 
Rookh." Luttrell wrote them in the name of 
Rogers, whose " Human Life " Lord Lauderdale 
was said to have by heart : — 

" I 'm told, dear Moore, your lays are sung 
(Can it be true, you lucky man ?) 
By moonlight in the Persian tongue, 
Along the streets of Ispahan. 

"'Tis hard, but one reflexion cures, 
At once, a jealous poet's smart : 
The Persians have translated yours, 
But Lauderdale has mine by heart." 

Not the least piquant thing connected with 
this little jeu d'esprit, so carefully transferred to 



LuttrelVs ^^ Letters to Julia,'' 219 

his Preface and Diary by the author of the 
" Irish Melodies," is, that LuttrelFs informant 
was none other than Thomas Moore himself.^ 

1 Henry Luttrell was a natural son of Colonel Luttrell, 
afterwards second Earl of Carhampton. He died as late 
as December, 1851. Those who desire further particulars 
concerning this " Old Society Wit " will do well to con- 
sult a most interesting paper with that title in Temple 
Bar for January, 1895, ^Y ^ charming writer of reminis- 
cences, the late Mrs. Andrew Crosse. 



CHANGES AT CHARING CROSS. 

LOOKING from that " coign of vantage," 
the portico of the National Gallery, upon 
what Peel called ** the finest site in Europe," it 
is impossible not to think of its vicissitudes. 
With the exception of St. Martin's Church, 
which IS comparatively modern, the only an- 
tiquity now left to link the present with the past 
is the statue of Charles I., riding unhasting, un- 
resting, to his former Palace of Westminster, 
and dating from a day when Trafalgar Square 
was but an irregular range of houses surrounding 
a royal mews. Only a quarter of a century ago 
stood in its vicinity an older relic still. If the 
stones that formed the fine Jacobean frontage 
of Northumberland House could have spoken, 
they would have pleaded that they knew of a 
remoter time when, in place of the royal martyr 
proclaiming from his pedestal, in Waller's turn- 
coat line, that 

*' Rebellion, though successful, is but vain," 

had risen the time-honoured cross which marked 
the last halting place of Queen Eleanor's body 



Changes at Charing Cross. 221 

in its progress to the Abbey. The old Cross 
again had more ancient memories than North- 
umberland House. It could recall a falconry — 
not unhaunted of a certain rhyming Clerk of 
Works called Geoffrey Chaucer — which was 
long anterior to the royal mews ; and it remem- 
bered how — 

" Ere yet, in scorn of Peter's pence, 

And number'd bead, and shrift, 

Bluff Harry broke into the spence 

And turn'd the cowls adrift," — 

the hospital of St. Mary Rounceval had preceded 
the great palace of the Percies. 

In any retrospect of Charing Cross, Queen 
Eleanor's monument forms a convenient start- 
ing point, and from Ralph Agas's well-known 
survey of 1^92 we get a fair idea of its environ- 
ment in the reign of Elizabeth. At this date 
there were, comparatively speaking, few build- 
ings in its neighbourhood. On the river side, 
indeed, houses straggled from the Strand towards 
Whitehall ; but St. Martin's was actually " in 
the fields," Spring Gardens was as open as " S* 
Jemes Parke," and where to-day stand Covent 
Garden and Her Majesty's Theatre, laundresses 
laid their clothes to dry. Along Hedge Lane, 
which began at the present Union Club and fol- 



222 Miscellanies. 

lowed the line of Dorset Place and Whitcomb 
Street, you might, if so minded, carry your 
Corinna through green pastures to eat tarts at 
Hampstead or Highgate, passing, it may be, on 
the road. Master Ben Jonson from Hartshorne 
Lane (now Northumberland Street), unconscious 
for the moment of any other '* humour" in life 
than the unlimited consumption of blackberries. 
By the windmill at St. Giles's you might find 
him flying his kite, or (and why not, since the 
child is father to the man ?) displaying prema- 
turely his " Roman infirmity " of boasting to his 
ragged playmates of the parish school. 

But to the sober antiquary the pleasures of 
imagination are forbidden ; and the Cross itself 
has yet to be described. Unfortunately, there 
are no really trustworthy representations of it, 
and even its designer's name is uncertain. It 
was long ascribed to Pietro Cavallini, to whom 
tradition also attributes the monument of Henry 
II I. in Westminster Abbey. What is undoubted, 
however, is that it was one of several similar 
crosses erected by the executors of Eleanor of 
Castile ; that it was begun by one Richard de 
Crundale, cementariuSj and after his death con- 
tinued by another of the family; and that its 
material came from Caen in Normandy, and 
Corfe in Dorsetshire. From Agas's map it 



Changes at Charing Cross. 223 

seems to have been octagonal in shape with 
tiers of niches ; and it was decorated with 
paintings and gilt metal figures modelled by 
Alexander Le Imaginator. It stood from 1296 
until, by vote of May the 3rd, 1643, the Long 
Parliament, in the same iconoclastic spirit which 
prompted the removal of the "Golden Cross" 
sign as "superstitious and idolatrous," decreed 
its demolition. "The parliament," says a con- 
temporary Royalist ballad, still to be found in 
Percy's * Reliques,' 

** * The parliament to vote it down 

Conceived it very fitting, 
For fear it should fall, and kill them all, 

In the house as they were sitting. 
They were told, God-wot, it had a plot,i 

Which made them so hard-hearted, 
To give command, it should not stand, 

But be taken down and carted.' " 

Other verses bewail its disappearance as a 
familiar landmark : — 

" Undone, undone, the lawyers are. 
They wander about the towne. 
Nor can find the way to Westminster, 
Now Charing-Cros is downe." 

1 This was Waller's plot of June, 1643, ^o disarm the 
London militia, etc., for which Tompkins and Chaloner 
were executed. 



224 Miscellanies. 

As a matter of fact, it was not actually *' taken 
down and carted" till the summer of 1647. 
Part of its stones, says Charles's biographer, 
William Lilly, went to pave Whitehall, and oth- 
ers were fashioned into knife-hafts, "which, 
being well polished, looked like marble." Sic 
transit gloria mundi! 

Its site remained unoccupied for seven and 
twenty years. But here, in the interval, the 
regicides met their fate. Harrison, CromweU's 
chaplain Peters, John Jones, Carew, and others, 
all suffered ^' at the railed space where Charing 
Cross stood." Pepys, between an account of 
the wantonness of Mrs. Palmer and the episode 
of " a very pretty lady" who cried out at the 
playhouse "to see Desdemona smothered," has 
the following entry of Harrison's death, which 
he witnessed: — 'M^* [October, 1660]. I 
went out to Charing Cross to see Major-general 
Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered ; which 
was done there, he looking as cheerful as any 
man could do in that condition. He was pres- 
ently cut down, and his head and heart shown to 
the people, at which there was great shouts of 
joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to 
come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge 
them that now had judged him ; and that his 
wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was 



Changes at Charing Cross. 225 

my chance to see the King beheaded at White 
Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge 
for the King at Charing Cross." 

Grave John Evelyn has also his record : — 
'' 17 [October, 1660]. Scot, Scroope, Cook, 
and Jones suffered for reward of their iniquities 
at Charing Crosse, in sight of the place where 
they put to death their natural Prince, and in 
the presence of the King his sonn, whom they 
also sought to kill. I saw not their execution ; 
but met their quarters mangl'd and cutt and 
reeking as they were brought from the gallows 
in baskets on the hurdle. Oh, the miraculous 
providence of God ! " 

For further particulars of these dismal butch- 
eries the reader is referred to the State Trials. 
In the years to come, less gruesome sights suc- 
ceeded. From the overseers' books of St. 
Martin's, Mr. Peter Cunningham discovered 
entries of sums paid in 1666 and 1667 by " Pun- 
chinello, y« Italian popet-player for his Booth 
at Charing Cross," and in 1668 there are simi- 
lar records for the " playhouse " of a ** Mounsr. 
Devone." Then, in 1674, the present "noble 
equestrian statue " as Walpole styles it, was 
erected, not too promptly, by Charles II. 

Its story is singular, — almost as singular as 
that of the statue of the Merry Monarch himself, 
15 



226 Miscellanies. 

which loyal Sir Robert Viner, " Alderman, Knight 
and Baronet," put up in the old Stocks Market. 
It appears to have been executed about 1633 by 
Hubert Le Soeur, a pupil of John of Bologna, 
for the Lord High Treasurer Weston, who in- 
tended it to embellish his garden at Roehampton. 
By the terms of the commission it was to be of 
brass, a foot larger than life, and the sculptor 
"was to take advice of his Maj. (Charles I.) 
riders of greate horses, as well for the shape of 
the horse and action as for the graceful shape 
and action of his Maj. figure on the same." 
Before the beginning of the Civil War, according 
to Walpole, the statue, cast but not erected, was 
sold by the Parliament to John Rivett, brazier, 
dwelling at the Dial near Holborn Conduit, 
who was strictly enjoined to break it up. Rivett, 
whose "faith was large in time," carefully 
buried it instead, and ingenuously exhibited 
some broken brass in earnest of its destruction. 
Report further says that, making capital out of 
both parties, he turned these mythic fragments 
into knife and fork handles, which the Royalists 
bought eagerly as relics, and the Puritans as 
tokens of the downfall of a despot. In any case 
there is evidence to show that the statue was 
still in Rivett's possession in 1660, and it is 
assumed that it passed from him or his family to 



Changes at Charing Cross. 227 

the second Charles. Strype says that he pre- 
sented it to the King, which is not unlikely. 
The pedestal, finely carved with cupids, palms, 
armour, and so forth, is attributed to Grinling 
Gibbons. Somewhere near it was the Pillory 
where, every loth of August, for several suc- 
cessive years, stood the infamous Titus Gates. 
Edmund Curll, too (upon that principle which 
makes Jack Sheppard one of the '^ eminent " 
persons buried in St. Martin's), was once its 
*' distinguished" occupant, for one of his scan- 
dalous publications ; and later Parsons of the 
Cock Lane Ghost suffered here those amenities 
so neatly described by Robert Lloyd in his 
"Epistle to Churchill": — 

" Thus, should a wooden collar deck 
Some woefuU 'squire's embarrass'd neck, 
When high above the crowd he stands 
With equidistant sprawling hands. 
And without hat, politely bare, 
Pops out his head to take the air ; 
The mob his kind acceptance begs, 
Of dirt, and stones, and addle-eggs." 

To the right of King Charles's statue, upon a 
site now traversed diagonally by Northumberland 
Avenue, stood, until 1874, the last of the great 
riverside mansions, Northumberland House. 
Its facade extended from the statue towards 



228 Miscellanies. 

Northumberland Street, and its gardens went 
back to Scotland Yard, into which it had a gate. 
Northampton House, as it was first called, 
was built about 1605 for Henry Howard, Earl 
of Northampton, by Bernard Jansen and Gerard 
Christmas — Christmas, it is supposed, being 
responsible for the florid gateway or " frontis- 
piece." From the Earl of Northampton it 
passed to the Suffolks, and changed its name 
to Suffolk House, a name which it retained 
until 1670, when becoming the property of the 
Percies it was again re-christened. Londoners, 
except upon such special occasions as Exhibition 
years and the like, saw little of the place beyond 
the facade. Its original plan was a quadrangle, 
uncompleted at first on the garden-side. Alger- 
non Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, added 
a new river-front, and a stone flight of stairs, 
which Mr. Evelyn regarded as clumsy and 
"without any neat invention." In the interior 
its chief glory was a double state-staircase with 
marble steps. There was also a state-gallery of 
magnificent proportions, a drawing-room deco- 
rated by Angelica KaufFman, and a tapestry- 
chamber by Zuccarelli. The pictures which, 
with the wonderful stiff'-tailed leaden lion so 
long familiar to passers by, are now transferred 
to Sion House at Isleworth, including Titian's 



Changes at Charing Cross. iic^ 

famous Cornaro family (Evelyn's "Venetian 
Senators"), and a number of minor masterpieces. 
One of the show-curiosities was a Sevres vase 
nine feet high, presented to the second Duke of 
Northumberland by Charles X. of France. 

It would be easy to accumulate anecdote 
around this ancient dwelling-place. From this 
*' house with stairs " by Charing Cross set out 
that merry marriage procession of Boyle and 
Howard, which Suckling has immortalised in 
the '* Ballad on a Wedding ; " and hence, too, 
Mr. Horace Walpole, with a hackney-coach full 
of persons of condition fresh from the opera, 
started to interview the Cock Lane Ghost. 
Here again, in the fire of 1780, great part of the 
library of the Duke's chaplain and relative. Dr. 
Percy, was destroyed in his apartments, where, 
doubtless, he often received Reynolds and John- 
son, Goldsmith, also, among others, made one 
very characteristic visit to the same spot, though 
not on this occasion as the guest of the Bishop 
of Dromore. Let him tell the story in his own 
words, apud Washington Irving : — 

'' I dressed myself in the best manner I could, 
and, after studying some compliments I thought 
necessary on such an occasion, proceeded to 
Northumberland House, and acquainted the ser- 
vants that I had particular business with the 



230 Miscellanies. 

duke. They showed me into an ante-chamber, 
where, after waiting some time, a gentleman, 
very elegantly dressed, made his appearance ; 
taking him for the duke, I delivered all the fine 
things I had composed in order to compliment 
him on the honour he had done me ; when, to 
my great astonishment, he told me I had mis- 
taken him for his master, who would see me im- 
mediately. At that instant the duke came into 
the apartment, and I was so confounded on the 
occasion, that I wanted words barely sufficient 
to express the sense I entertained of the duke's 
politeness, and went away exceedingly chagrined 
at the blunder I had committed." ^ 

Fronting Northumberland House, a little to 
the left, and at some distance from the site of the 
present hotel of the same name, stood, until 
the advent of railroads brought about its down- 
fall as a posting-house, that older Golden Cross,^ 
whose idolatrous sign scandalised the Puritan 
House of Commons. But the sign must have 
been soon restored, for it is distinguishable in Ca- 
naletto's view of 17^3, though the carriage at the 
1 " Oliver Goldsmith : a Biography," 1849, P- i^^- 
-' In that half-authentic, half-romantic book, the " "Wine 
and Walnuts" of Ephraim Hardcastle (Pyne the Artist), 
he makes Hogarth catch a cold while sketching from the 
inn window the pageant of the proclamation of George III. 
at Charing Cross. 



Changes at Charing Cross. 231 

door probably hides the long water-trough which, 
sixty years since, old Londoners still remem- 
bered as giving the place something of the air of 
a country inn. From the Golden Cross, houses 
extended northward to St. Martin's Church — 
Duncannon Street being as yet to come. Trafal- 
gar Square and the space now occupied by the 
National and National Portrait Galleries was 
covered, as far back as Hemings' Row, by build- 
ings surrounding the King's or royal mews. In 
the days before Agas's map this had been a fal- 
conry, dating from Richard II. or earlier ; but 
in 1534, when Henry VIII.'s stables at Loms- 
bery (Bloomsbury) were fired and burned, the 
royal stables were transferred to the buildings at 
Charing Cross, which, nevertheless, retained 
their old name of mews (i. e., a mewing place) 
which they first had " of the King's falcons there 
kept." Here, in the Caroline days, the famous 
stallion "Rowley" ^^ champed golden grain" 
like the horses in the '' Iliad/' and gave his nick- 
name to a king. Here, too, M. St. Antoine 
taught the noble art of horsemanship. In 1732, 
William Kent rebuilt the fa9ade. At this date, 
as shown in a plan in the British Museum, 
dated 1690, it still consisted of the " Great 
Mews," the '' Green Mews," and the " Back 
Mews." It continued to be used for stabling 



232 Miscellanies. 

until 1824, when the royal stud, gilt coach, and 
other paraphernalia were transferred to Pimlico. 
In 1830, after serving as a temporary shelter to 
Mr. Cross's menagerie, then ousted from Exeter 
Change, and to the homeless Public Records of 
Great Britain, it was pulled down. Not many 
traditions haunt its past which need a mention 
here. Its northeastern side, if we may trust 
Gay's " Trivia," was a chosen resort of thieves 
and gamblers. " Careful Observers " (he says), 
" studious of the Town," 

" Pass by the Mmse, nor try the Thimble's Cheats ; " 

and it may be observed that the ill-famed rookery, 
known in Ben Jonson's day as the " Bermu- 
das " and later, by convenient euphemism, as 
the " CVibbee Islands," was close to St. Mar- 
tin's Church, where it survived until 1829. At 
the Upper Mews-Gate stood a convivial house 
of call, celebrated in song by " bright broken 
Maginn; "^ and hard by, from 1750 to 1790, 

^ " I miss already, with a tear, 

The Mews-Gate public house, 
Where many a gallant grenadier 

Did lustily carouse ; 
Alas ! Macadam's droughty dust 

That honoured spot doth fill, 
Where they were wont the ale robust 

In the King's name to swill," 



Changes at Charing Cross. 233 

" Honest Tom Payne " kept the little old book- 
shop, " in the shape of an L." once so well 
known to book-lovers in the last century.^ 

Towards 1829-30 the neighbourhood of 
Charing Cross began to assume something of 
its present aspect. Already, four years earlier, 
the College of Physicians, leaving its home in 
Warwick Lane, had taken up its abode in a 
handsome building at the bottom of Dorset 
Place, close by the newly-erected Union Club. 
Then, about 1830, the ground was cleared for 
Trafalgar Square, and the C'ribbee Islands and 
the rookeries were " blotted from the things 
that be." In 1832, the present National Gal- 
lery was begun. Nelson's Column followed, in 
1840-9, and then, many years after, was finally 
completed by the addition of Landseer's lions. 
Since the National Gallery first became the 
laughing-stock of cockneys, it has been more 
than once enlarged ; and even at the present 
moment further extensions at the back, of con- 
siderable importance to the picture-seer, are said 
to be in contemplation. But it is needless to 
dwell at any length upon the present aspect of 
the place. It is too modern for the uses of the 
antiquary ; and it may be doubted if time can 

1 See " The Two Paynes " in " Eighteenth Century 
Vignettes," Second Series, pp. 199-202. 



2 34 Miscellanies. 

ever make it venerable. In' justice to its unfor- 
tunate architect, Wilkins, it must, nevertheless, 
be added that his work was done under most 
unfavourable restrictions. He was vexatiously 
hampered as to space, and Carlton House hav- 
ing been demolished, it was an express condi- 
tion that he should avail himself of its fine 
Corinthian portico. 

The only other building near Charing Cross 
which deserves notice is St. Martin's Church. 
This, however, will better be reserved for treat- 
ment on some future occasion in conjunction 
with St. Martin's Lane. But Spring Garden, 
or Gardens, part of which has already disap- 
peared under the new Admiralty buildings, re- 
quires and deserves a final paragraph. It lies to 
the southwest of the Cross, and according to 
old definitions had a frontage extending from 
the end of the Haymarket to Wallingford House 
(the present Admiralty). In the days of James I. 
and Charles I. it was a pleasure-ground attached 
to Whitehall Palace, taking its name from one of 
those y^fs d'eauy the delight of seventeenth cen- 
tury topiarians, which suddenly sprinkled the 
visitor who unwittingly pressed it with his foot. 
It contained butts, a bathing-pond, and appar- 
ently part of the St. James's Park menagerie, 
since the State papers contain an order under 



Changes at Charing Cross. 235 

date of the 31st January, 1626, for payment to 
Philip, Earl of Montgomery, of £72, 55, lod, 
for '^keeping the Spring-Gardens and the beasts 
and fowls there." One of the favourite amuse- 
ments of the place v/as bowling, and it was 
while Charles was watching the players with 
his favourite Steenie, who lived at this date in 
Wallingford House, that an oft related incident 
took place : — " The Duke put on his hat ; one 
Wilson, a Scotchman, first kissing the Duke's 
hand, snatched it off, saying, ' Off with your 
hat before the King I ' Buckingham, not apt to 
restrain his feelings, kicked the Scotchman ; 
but the King, interfering, said, ' Let him alone, 
George ; he is either mad or a fool.' ' No, 
sir,' replied the Scotchman, ' I am a sober man ; 
and if your majesty would give me leave I will 
tell you that of this man which many know, and 
none dare speak.' " 

Whether his majesty permitted the proffered 
revelation, so significant of the popular estimate 
of Buckingham, history has not recorded. But 
the garden at this time (1628) must have been 
private, for it was not until two years later that 
Charles threw it open by proclamation, appoint- 
ing one Simon Osbaldeston "keeper of the 
King's Garden called the Spring Garden and of 
His Majesty's Bowling-green there." Four 



236 Miscellanies. 

years after, it had grown so " scandalous and 
insufferable " a resort that he closed it again. 
It must, however, have been reopened, for in 
June, 1649, Mr. Evelyn tells us that he " treated 
divers Ladies of my relations, in Spring Gar- 
den ; " and though Cromwell shut it up once 
more, it could not have been for long, as ten 
years after Evelyn's date it was still offering 
its sheltering thickets to love-makers, and its 
neats' tongues and bad Rhenish to wandering 
epicures. 

With the Restoration ends its history as a 
pleasure-ground. To the disgust of the dwell- 
ers at Charing Cross, houses began to arise 
upon it ; and its frequenters migrated to the 
newer " Spring Garden " at Vauxhall. By 1772, 
when Lord Berkeley was permitted to build 
over the so-called '' Wilderness," its last traces 
had disappeared. But "the whirligig of time 
brings in his revenges," and Lord Berkeley's 
house in its turn has now made way for the 
office of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and 
that again for the London County Council. 

As a locality Spring Gardens — the Spring 
Gardens of brick and mortar — has been un- 
usually favoured with distinguished inhabitants. 
Here Cromwell is said to have had a house ; 
and it was "at one Thomson's," next door to 



Changes at Charing Cross. 237 

the Bull Head Tavern, in the thoroughfare lead- 
ing to the park, that his Latin secretary, John 
Milton, wrote his " Joannis Philippi Angli 
Responsio," etc. Colley Gibber's home, for 
several years, was hard by ; so also w^as the 
lodging occupied by the author of the " Sea- 
sons," w^hen he first came to London to nego- 
tiate his poem of "Winter." In Buckingham 
Court lived and died sprightly Mrs, Centlivre, 
whose husband (her third) was yeoman of the 
mouth to Anne and George L Locket's ordi- 
nary — the " Lackets " of my Lord Foppington 
and the ^' stap-my-vitals " fine gentlemen of 
Vanbrugh's day — stood on the site of Drum- 
mond's Bank. Two doors from it, towards 
Buckingham Gourt, was the famous " Rummer " 
Tavern kept by Matthew Prior's uncle, Samuel 
Pryor, also or formerly landlord of that Rhenish 
Wine House in Gannon Row where Dorset 
first discovered the clever young student of 
Horace whom he helped to turn into a states- 
man and ambassador.^ The "Rummer" ap- 
pears in Hogarth's "Night" (" Four Times 
of the Day," 1738), which gives a view of 
the statue with the houses behind. Hogarth's 
*' Rummer/' however, is on the left, whereas 

1 See Matthew Prior, in "Eighteenth Century Vig- 
nettes," Third Series, p. 229. 



238 Miscellanies. 

the tavern (according to Cunningham) was, after 
1710, removed to the right or Northumber- 
land House side. Probably in the plate, as 
in the one of Covent Garden in the same 
series, the viev^^ w^as reversed in the process of 
engraving. 

Hogarth's name recalls another memory. It 
was in an auctioneer's room in Spring Gardens 
(now part of the offices of the London County 
Council) that the Society of Artists of Great 
Britain held their famous second exhibition of 
1 76 1, for the catalogue of which Wale and 
Hogarth made designs. Hogarth was also a 
prominent exhibitor, sending, among other oil 
paintings, "The Lady's Last Stake" (Mr. 
Huth's), the " Election Entertainment" (Soane 
Museum), and the ill-fated " Sigismunda," the 
last of which is now gaining, in the National 
Gallery, some of the reputation which was de- 
nied to it in the painter's lifetime. 



JOHN GAY. 

NO very material addition, in the way of 
supplementary information, can now be 
made to the frequently reprinted "Life of Gay" 
in Johnson's " Poets," or to the genial and 
kindly sketch in Thackeray's '^English Hu- 
mourists."^ Gay was born at Barnstaple in 
1685, and baptised at the Old Church of that 
town on the i6th September. He came of 
an ancient but impoverished family, being the 
younger son of William Gay, who lived at the 
*' Red Cross," a house in Joy Street, which, 
judging from the church-rate paid by its occu- 
pants, must have been one of the best of the 

1 This is still practically true. But in an excellent edi- 
tion of Gay's " Poetical Works," prepared for the " Muses' 
Library/' in 1893, the late John Underhill, a Barnstaple 
man and a Gay enthusiast, besides making certain bio- 
graphical rectifications, contrived to discover a few new 
facts. " Some details that have not been known to former 
writers " were also supplied by Mr. George A. Aitken in 
an interesting paper prompted by Mr. Underhill's volumes, 
and contributed to the Westminster Revietv for January, 
1894. 



240 Miscellanies. 

Barnstaple dwellings. He lost his father in 
1695, his mother — whose maiden name was 
Hanmer — having died in the previous year. 
He thus became an orphan at the early age of 
ten, and in all probability, fell into the care of 
a Barnstaple uncle, Thomas Gay. He was edu- 
cated at the free grammar school of his native 
place, where his master was one Rayner, after- 
wards succeeded by the "Robert Luck, A. M.," 
whose " Miscellany of New Poems" was pub- 
lished in 17^6 (four years after Gay's death) by 
Edward Cave. One of the pieces was a Latin 
version of Prior's "Female Phaeton," and its 
author, in an English introduction to his work, 
inscribed to Gay's patron, Charles Douglas, 
Duke of Queensberry and Dover, sought 
to associate himself with his pupil's metrical 
proficiency. 

" O Queensberry ! cou'd happy Gay 
This Off'ring to thee bring, 
'Tis his, my Lord (he 'd smiling say) 
Who taught your Gay to sing." 

It is, moreover, asserted that Gay's dramatic 
turn was stimulated by the plays which the 
pupils at Barnstaple were in the habit of per- 
forming under this rhyming pedagogue. Of his 
schooldays, however, nothing is known with 



John Gay. 241 

precision ; but it is clear from his subsequent 
career that he somewhere obtained more than a 
bowing acquaintance with the classics. There 
is still preserved, in the " Forster Library'' at 
South Kensington, a large paper copy of Mait- 
taire's "Horace'' (Tonson and Watts, 171 5), 
which contains his autograph, and is copiously 
annotated in his beautiful handwriting. This of 
itself should be sufficient to refute the aspersions 
sometimes cast upon his scholarship ; for it af- 
fords unanswerable evidence that, even at thirty, 
and perhaps at a much later period, he remained 
a diligent student of the charming lyrist and 
satirist, who, above all others, commends him- 
self to the attention of idle men. In his boy- 
hood, however, it must be assumed that Gay's 
indolence was more strongly developed than his 
application, for his friends could find no better 
opening for him than that of apprentice to a 
London silk mercer. With this employment he 
was speedily dissatisfied. Dr. Hill Burton, in 
his " History of the Reign of Queen Anne," 
implies that he ran away; but there is nothing 
to show that he took any step of so energetic a 
character. His nephew, the Rev. Joseph Bailer, 
in the little publication entitled " Gay's Chair," 
explains that, " not being able to bear the con- 
finement of a shop," his uncle became depressed 
16 



242 Miscellanies. 

in spirits and health, and therefore returned to 
his native town, taking up his residence, not, as 
before, with Thomas Gay, but with his mother's 
brother, the Rev. John Hanmer, the Barnstaple 
Nonconformist minister. 

That Gay should have found the littering of 
polished counters with taffeties and watered 
tabbies an uncongenial occupation is not sur- 
prising, especially if be added thereto that thank- 
less service of those feminine "silk-worms" 
who (as Swift says in the ''City Shower ") ^' Pre- 
tend to cheapen Goods, but nothing buy." Yet 
it is to be feared that the lack of energy which 
was his leading characteristic would have equally 
disposed him against any continuous or laborious 
calling. When his health was restored, he went 
back to town, living for some time (according 
to Mr. Bailer^) "as a private gentleman" — a 
statement which is scarcely reconcilable with the 
modest opening in life his family had selected 
for him. Already he is supposed to have made 
some definite essays in literature, and the swarm- 
ing taverns and coffee-houses of the metropolis 
afforded easy opportunities of access to nota- 
bilities of all sorts. He had besides some friends 
already established in London. Fortescue, 
Pope's correspondent, and later Master of the 
1 " Gay's Chair," 1820, p. 17. 



John Gay. 243 

Rolls, had been his schoolmate at Luck's ; while 
another of Luck's alumni was Aaron Hill, the 
playwright. According to a time-honoured tra- 
dition, Gay acted for some time as Hill's secre- 
tary. But Hill himself was only embarking in 
letters when, in May, 1708, Gay published, as 
an eight-leaf folio, his first poem of " Wine," 
the purport of which may be gathered from the 
Horatian — 

" Nulla placere diu, nee vivere carmina possunt, 
Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus," — 

of its motto, a moot theory which seems to have 
" exercised " the author throughout his life-time, 
since he is still discussing it in his last letters. 
^' I continue to drink nothing but water," he 
tells Swift two years before his death, " so that 
you can't require any poetry from me." The 
publisher of "Wine" was William Keble, at 
the Black-Spread-Eagle in Westminster Hall, 
and it was also pirated by Henry Hills of the 
*' brown sheets and scurvy letter/' referred to 
in Gay's subsequent " Epistle to Bernard Lin- 
tott." " Wine " professes to "draw Miltonic 
air," but the atmosphere inhaled is more sugges- 
tive of the " Splendid Shilling " of John Philips. 
Gay did not reprint the poem in his subscription 
edition of 1720, perhaps because of its blank 



244 Miscellanies. 

verse ; but the concluding lines, which describe 
the breaking up of a '* midnight Modern Con- 
versation " at the Devil Tavern by Temple Bar, 
already disclose the minute touch of ''Trivia": — 

*' now all abroad 
Is hush'd and silent, nor the rumbling noise 
Of coach or cart, or smoky link-boys' call 
Is heard — but universal Silence reigns : 
When we in merry plight, airy and gay, 
Surpris'd to find the hours so swiftly fly 
With hasty knock, or twang of pendent cord, 
Alarm the drowsy youth from slumb'ring nod ; 
Startled he flies, and stumbles o'er the stairs 
Erroneous, and with busy knuckles plies 
His yet clung eyelids, and with stagg'ring reel 
Enters confused, and mutt'ring asks our wills ; 
When we with liberal hand the score discharge, 
And homeward each his course with steady step 
Unerring steers, of cares and coin bereft." 

As it is expressly stated that the Bordeaux — 
the particular vintage specified — vi^as paid for, 
it is clear that, at this time, Gay must have suc- 
ceeded in finding either a purse or a paymaster. 
It is equally clear from his next ascertained pro- 
duction that he had acquired more than a slight 
familiarity v^^ith the world of letters. A year 
after the publication of '• Wine " Steele established 
the Taller; and in May, 171 1, when the Spec- 
talor was two months old, Gay favoured the 



John Gay. 245 

world with his impressions of "the Histories 
and Characters of all our Periodical Papers, 
whether Monthly, Weekly or Diurnal," in a 
threepenny pamphlet, entitled "The Present 
State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the 
Country." This, which Mr. Arber has reprinted 
in volume vi. of his '• English Garner," is of 
more than fugitive interest. It disclaims poli- 
tics upon the ground that it does not care " one 
farthing either for Whig or Tory,'' but it refers 
to the Examiner as "a Paper which all Men, 
who speak without Prejudice, allow to be well 
Writ." At this time Swift evidently knew 
nothing of his critic, for he tells Stella that 
'' the author seems to be a Whig "...." Above 
all things, he praises the Tatlers and Spectators; 
and I believe Steele and Addison were privy to 
the printing of it. Thus is one treated by these 
impudent dogs " [with whom his relations were 
strained]. Apart from his disclaimer of politics, 
nevertheless, Gay, if he was anything, was a Tory, 
and Swift was wrong. But Gay was clearly well 
informed about the secret history of Steele's ven- 
tures, and he gives an excellent account of the 
" Esquire's p. e. Bickerstaff's] Lucubrations." 
" He has indeed rescued it [Learning] out of 
the hands of Pedants, and Fools, and discovered 
the true method of making it amiable and lovely 



246 Miscellanies. 

to all mankind.^ In the dress he gives it, 'tis a 
most welcome guest at Tea-tables and Assemblies, 
and it is relish'd and caressed by the Merchants on 
the Change ; accordingly, there is not a Lady at 
Court, nor a Banker in Lumhard- Street, who is 
not verily perswaded, that Captain Steele is the 
greatest Scholar, and best Casuist, of any Man 
in England." From other passages it is also 
plain that the writer (like Swift) knew who was 
Steele's unnamed colleague, for he speaks of 
Addison's assistance as "no longer a Secret," 
and compares the conjunction of the two 
friends to that of Somers and Halifax " in a late 
Reign." It may consequently be concluded that 
he had at least made Steele's acquaintance, and 
that the set of the Tatters in four volumes on 
royal paper, which Tonson at this time trans- 
mitted to Gay ''by Mr. Steel's Orders," is at 
once a confirmation of the fact and a tacit recog- 
nition of the welcome compliments contained 
in " J. G.'s" " Present State of Wit." 

But " Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff " was not the 
only notability to whom Gay had become known. 
In July, 171 1, we find Pope sending Henry 
Cromwell his " service to all my few friends, 

1 These words seem like an echo of the passage from 
Blackmore's Preface to " Prince Arthur," which Steele 
quotes admiringly in Spectator No. 6. 



John Gay. 247 

and to Mr. Gay in particular," and in the same 
year Gay wrote the already mentioned "" Epis- 
tle to Lintott," which contained among other 
things, reference to the harmonious " Muse" of 
the young author of the " Pastorals" and the 
recently-issued " Essay on Criticism." 

" His various^jiumbers charm our ravish'd ears, 
His steady judgment far out-shoots his years, 
And early in the youth the god appears," 

sang this panegyrist in one of those triplets that 
Swift abominated. But Pope, who saw the lines 
in manuscript, accepted the flattering unction 
without reserve, and the epistle accordingly, in 
the following May (17 12), made its appearance 
in Lintott's famous " Rape of the Lock " Miscel- 
lany, to which Gay also contributed the Story of 
Arachne from Ovid. He was still, it seems, un- 
known to the general public, for the contempo- 
rary announcement of the book, while giving 
''bold advertisement" to such lesser lights as 
Fenton, Broome, and Henry Cromwell, refrains 
from including his name among the eminent hands 
who contributed to the collection. Nor is it 
probable that his reputation had been greatly 
served by the " tragi-comical farce" he had 
issued a week or two before under the title 
of "The Mohocks," — i. e., the midnight revel- 
lers whose real (or imaginary) misdeeds were 



24B Miscellanies. 

at that time engaging public attention. It was 
inscribed to Dennis the critic, who was in- 
formed (in his own vocabulary) that its subject 
was ^^ Horrid and Tremendous,'' that it was 
conceived " according to the exactest Rules of 
Dramatick Poetry," and that it was based upon 
his own " Appius and Virginia." Notwith- 
standing an intentionally ambiguous title-page,^ 
it was never acted, and its interest, like others 
of Gay's efforts, is purely " temporary." 

Before 171 2 had ended. Pope was able to 
congratulate his new ally upon what promised 
to be a material stroke of good fortune. He 
was appointed "Secretary or Domestic Stew- 
ard" to the Duchess of Monmouth, — that 
"virtuous and excellent lady," as Evelyn calls 
her, whose husband had been beheaded in the 
year of Gay's birth. The exact amount of de- 
pendence implied by this office is obscure, and 
it is differently estimated by different narrators. 
It is more material to note that Gay must 
already have been engaged upon his next poeti- 

1 The following is the advertisement in the Spectator 
for loth April, 1712: — 

"This Day is Published, The Mohocks. A Tragi- 
comical Farce. As it was Acted near the Watch-house in 
Covent-Garden. By her Majesty's Servants. Printed for 
Bernard Lintott; at the Cross-Keys between the two 
Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street." 



John Gay. 249 

cal effort, perhaps his first serious one, the 
Georgic called ''Rural Sports," which he in- 
scribed to Pope. It was published by Tonson 
on the 13th January, 171 3. To the reader of 
the post-Wordsworthian age, its merit is not re- 
markable, and Johnson anticipated the toujours 
Men, jamais mieux of Madame Guizot, when he 
described it as " never contemptible, nor ever 
excellent." Mr. Underhill, indeed, goes so far 
as to deny to it any experimental knowledge of 
country life ; and, as a matter of fact, Gay him- 
self admits that he had long been a town-dweller. 
Still his childhood must have been passed among 
rural scenes, and it is by no means certain that 
if he had written his verses at Barnstaple he 
would — writing as he did under Anna Augusta 
— have written them in a different way. We 
suspect that the germ of the objection, as often, 
is to be traced, not so much to the poem itself, 
as to certain preconceived shortcomings in its 
author. Johnson's disbelief in Goldsmith's abil- 
ity to distinguish between a cow and a horse no 
doubt coloured his appreciation of the '' Ani- 
mated Nature;" and Sv/ift (whom Mr. Under- 
hill quotes) doubted if Gay could tell an oak 
from a crab tree. " You are sensible," Swift 
went on, "that I know the full extent of your 
country skill is in fishing for roaches, or gud- 



2^0 Miscellanies. 

geons at the highest." With such a testimony 
before us, criticism of ''Rural Sports" easily 
becomes a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, 
it deserves more consideration than it has 
received. 

Apart from the production at Drury Lane, in 
May, 171 3, of a deplorable play, "The Wife of 
Bath," and the contribution to Steele's Guar- 
dian of two brightly written papers on " Flat- 
tery " and "^ Dress" (Nos. 11 and 149), Gay's 
next ascertained work was "The Fan." It is 
one of the contradictions of criticism that this 
poor and ineffectual poem should have been re- 
ceived with greater favour than the (relatively) 
far superior " Rural Sports." Gay's mythology 
is never very happy (Mr. Elwin roundly styles 
it " stupid "), and he always writes best with his 
eye on the object. Pope, however, interested 
himself in "The Fan," and even touched on 
that "little modish machine" in parts, — cir- 
cumstances which give it a slender interest. A 
week or two later appeared Steele's " Poetical 
Miscellany," in which Gay is represented by 
"A Contemplation upon Death," and by a pair 
of elegies (" Panthea " and " Araminta "). But 
his first individual performance, "The Shep- 
herd's Week," belongs to the early part of 1714. 
This again is closely connected with his friend- 



John Gay. 251 

ship with Pope. Pope, smarting under the 
praise which Tickell had given in the Guardian 
to the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips, and not 
content with perfidiously reviewing Philips him- 
self in the same periodical, now contrived to 
induce the author of " Rural Sports" to aid the 
cause by burlesquing his rival in a sequence of 
sham eclogues, in which he was to exhibit the 
Golden Age with the gilt off, "after the true 
ancient guise of Theocritus." "Thou wilt not 
find my Shepherdesses " — says the Author's 
" Proeme " — " idly piping on oaten Reeds, but 
milking the Kine, tying up the Sheaves, or if 
the Hogs are astray driving them to their Styes. 
My Shepherd gathereth none other Nosegays 
but what are the growth of our own Fields ; he 
sleepeth not under Myrtle shades, but under a 
Hedge, nor doth he vigilantly defend his Flocks 
from Wolves " [this was a palpable hit at Philips !] 
"because there are none." Like Fielding's 
"Joseph Andrews," the execution of "The 
Shepherd's Week " was far superior to its avowed 
object of mere ridicule. In spite of their bar- 
barous " Bumkinets" and " Grubbinols," Gay's 
little idylls abound with interesting folk-lore and 
(wherever acquired) with closely studied rural 
pictures. We see the country girl burning hazel 
nuts to find her sweetheart, or presenting the 



2 5 2 Miscellanies. 

faithless Colin with a knife with a "posy" on 
it, or playing at " Hot Cockles," or listening to 
"Gillian of Croydon," and "Patient Grissel." 
Nor are there wanting sly strokes of kindly satire, 
as when the shepherds are represented fencing 
the grave of Blouzelinda against the prospective 
inroads of the parson's horse and cow, which 
have the right of grazing in the churchyard ; or 
when that dignitary, in consideration of the 
liberal sermon-fee, " Spoke the Hour-glass in 
her praise — quite out." 

From a biographical point of view, however, 
the most interesting part of "The Shepherd's 
Week " is its dedicatory prologue to Boling- 
broke, a circumstance which, according to 
Swift, constituted that " original sin " against the 
Court which afterwards interfered so much with 
Gay's prospects of preferment. But its allusions 
also show that the former mercer's apprentice 
had already made the acquaintance of Arbuthnot, 
and probably of some gentler critics, whose 
favour was of greater importance. " No more," 
says the poet, 

" No more I '11 sing Buxoma brown, 
Like Goldfinch in her Sunday Gown ; 
Nor ClumsiliSy nor Marian bright, 
Nor Damsel that Hobnelia hight. 
But Lansdown fresh as Flow'r of May, 



John Gaf. 253 

And Berkly Lady blithe and gay, 
And Aitglesey whose Speech exceeds 
The voice of Pipe, or oaten Reeds ; 
And blooming Hide, with Eyes so rare, 
And Montague beyond compare." 

*' Blooming Hide, with eyes so rare,'' was 
Lady Jane Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clar- 
endon, and elder sister of the Catherine who was 
subsequently to be Gay's firmest friend. 

The Scriblerus Club, to which his friend 
Pope had introduced him, and for which he is 
said to have acted as Secretary, had also done 
him the greater service of securing him an even 
firmer ally in Swift, and it was doubtless to his 
connection with this famous association, of which 
Lord Oxford was an occasional member, that 
he was indebted for his next stroke of good for- 
tune. By June, 1714, he had resigned, or been 
dismissed from, his position in the household of 
the Duchess of Monmouth. But in that month, 
with the aid of his new friends, he was appointed 
Secretary to Lord Clarendon, then Envoy Ex- 
traordinary to the Court of Hanover, and there 
exists a brief rhymed appeal or " Epigrammati- 
cal Petition " from the impecunious poet to Lord 
Oxford (in his capacity as Lord Treasurer) 
for funds to enable him to enter upon his 
duties. 



2^4 Miscellanies, 

I 'm no more to converse with the swains. 

But go where fine people resort ; 
One can live without money on plains, 

But never without it at court. 

If, when with the swains I did gambol, 

I array'd me in silver and blue ; 
When abroad, and in courts, I shall ramble, 

Pray, my lord, how much money will do ? ^ 

He got, not without difficulty, and probably 
through the instrumentality of Arbuthnot (who 
handed in his memorial) a grant of ;^ioo for his 
outfit ; and he also got, from Swift in Ireland, a 
letter of fatherly advice exhorting him to learn to 
be a manager, to mind his Latin, to look up 
Aristotle upon Politics, and Grotius " De Jure 
Belli et Pacis." For a brief space we must im- 
agine him strutting in his new clothes through 
the clipped avenues of Herrenhausen, yawning 
over the routine life of the petty German Court, 
and perfecting himself in the diplomatic arts of 
" bowing profoundly, speaking deliberately, and 
wearing both sides of his long periwig before." 
Then the death of Queen Anne put an end to 
all these halcyon days. What was worse, the 
*' Shepherd's Week," as already stated, had been 
dedicated to Bolingbroke, and Bolingbroke — 
ill-luck would have it — was not in favour with 
1 Letter from Gay to Swift, June 8, 17 14. 



John Gay. 255 

Her Most Gracious Majesty's successor. In 
this juncture, as a course which " could do no 
harm, " Pope, who seems always to have treated 
Gay with unfailing affection, counselled his de- 
jected friend '^to write something on the King, 
or Prince, or Princess," and Arbuthnot said ditto 
to Pope. Gay, cheering up, accordingly, set 
about an '^ Epistle to a Lady [probably Mrs. 
Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk] : Occasion'd 
by the arrival of Her Royal Highness [i. e. the 
Princess of Wales, whom he had seen at Han- 
over]." In this he takes opportunity to touch 
plaintively upon the forlorn hopes of needy 
suitors : — 

" Pensive each night, from room to room I walk'd, 
To one I bow'd, and with another talk'd ; 
Enquir'd what news, or such a Lady's name, 
And did the next day, and the next, the same. 
Places, I found, were daily giv'n away 
And yet no friendly Gazette mentioned Gay." 

The only appreciable result of this ingenuous 
appeal was that Their Royal Highnesses came to 
Drury Lane in February, 171 5, to witness Gay's 
next dramatic effort, the tragic-comi-pastoral farce 
of the "What d'ye Call it," a piece after the fash- 
ion of Buckingham's "Rehearsal," inasmuch as 
it parodies the popular tragedies of the day, and 
even roused the ire of Steele by taking liberties 



2^6 Miscellanies, 

with Addison's '^Cato/' Without the " Key" 
which was speedily prepared by Theobald and 
Griffin the actor, its allusions must at first have 
fallen rather flat upon an uninstructed audience, 
especially as its action was grave and its images 
comic. Gay's matter-of-fact friend, Cromwell, 
who saw the gestures but, being deaf, could not 
hear the words, consequently found it hopelessly 
unintelligible. But it brought its author a hun- 
dred pounds, and it contains one of his most 
musical songs " 'T was when the seas were 
roaring." A few months after its publication in 
book form, Lord Burlington sent the poet into 
Devonshire, an expedition which he commem- 
orated in a pleasant tributary epistle published 
in 171 5 with the title of '' A Journey to Exeter." 
He had two travelling companions, no needless 
precaution when Bagshot Heath swarmed with 
'* broken gamesters" who had taken to the road, 
and he describes delightfully his impressions de 
voyage, — the fat and garrulous landlord at 
Hartley-Row, the red trout and "^ rich metheg- 
lin" at Steele's borough of Stockbridge, the 
*'cloak'd shepherd" on Salisbury Plain, the 
lobsters and " unadulterate wine" at More- 
combe-lake, ^ and last of all, the female barber at 
Axminster : — 

1 A writer in the Athenmnn for Dec. i, 1894, points 
out that this is a mistake. Gay must have stripped 



John Gay. 257 

The weighty golden chain adorns her neck, 
And three gold rings her skilful hand bedeck: 
Smooth o'er our chin her easy fingers move, 
Soft as when Vemis stcoak'd the beard oi/ove" 

Incidentally, we learn that Gay could draw, for 
he sketches the "eyeless" faces of his fellow 
travellers asleep in two chairs at Dorchester. 
Also that, at thirty, he was already stout : — 

You knewy^^f Bards might tire. 
And, mounted, sent me forth your trusty Squire. 

It must have been about this time that Gay 
composed another poem, somewhat akin to the 
Exeter epistle, inasmuch as both were probably 
influenced by the verses on " Morning " and " A 
City Shower," which Swift had contributed to 
Steele's Tatler. Indeed, in the Preface to 
"Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets 
of London," which appeared at the end of Jan- 
uary, 1716, Gay specially refers to hints given 
to him by Dr. Swift. The theme is an unex- 
pected one for an author whose tastes were 
certainly not pedestrian (" any lady with a coach 
and six horses would carry him to Japan," said 
the Dean later) ; but it has still its attraction to 

" the lobster of his scarlet mail " a little farther on, 
at Charmouth. But these references to food at least 
confirm Congreve's dictum of Gay, — "Edit, ergo est.'" 
17 



2^8 Miscellanies. 

the antiquary and the student of the early eigh- 
teenth century. Every one who desires to real- 
ise the London of the first George, with its 
signs and its street cries (that ramage de la vilhy 
which Will. Honeycomb preferred to larks and 
nightingales), its link boys and its chairmen, its 
sweeps, small-coal men, milk-maids, Mohocks, 
and the rest, must give his days and nights to 
the study of " Trivia." He will obtain valuable 
expert advice as to the ceremony of taking or 
giving the wall ; learn to distinguish and divide 
between a Witney Roquelaure and a Kersey 
Wrap-Rascal ; and, it may be, discover to his 
surprise that there were umbrellas before Jonas 
Hanway : — 

Good housewives all the winter's rage despise, 
Defended by the riding-hood's disguise : 
Or underneath th' umbrella's oily shed, 
Safe thro' the wet on clinking pattens tread. 

It is consoling to think that Gay made some 
£a^o by this eighteen-penny poem, and ;£ioo 
more by the subscriptions which Pope and oth- 
ers, always jealously watching over his interests, 
obtained to a large paper edition. But it is 
impossible to commend his next production, of 
which, indeed, it is suspected that he did no 
more than bear the blame. Although he signed 



John Gay. 259 

the advertisement of the comedy entitled '* Three 
Hours before Marriage," it is pretty sure that 
he had Pope and Arbuthnot for active coadju- 
tors. But vi^hether Pope libelled Dennis as 
"Sir Tremendous," or Arbuthnot Woodward, 
or Gay himself the Duchess of Monmouth as 
the very incidental "Countess of Hippoke- 
koana" (Ipecacuanha?) —are questions scarcely 
v^orthy of discussion now. It is sufficient 
that the piece was both gross and silly. It 
failed ignominiously on the boards in January, 
1717, and is not likely to be consulted in type 
except by fanatics of the fugitive like George 
Steevens, who reprinted it in the "Additions 
to Pope " of 1776. 

During all this period Gay seems to have been 
vaguely expecting Court favour, and to have 
suffered most of the discouragements of hope 
deferred. Yet, if the Court neglected his pre- 
tensions — and it nowhere appears that they 
were very well grounded — he always found 
friends whose kindness took a practical form. 
Lord Burlington had sent him to Exeter; in 
1717 Pulteney carried him to Aix as his Secre- 
tary, a trip which furnished the occasion of a 
second Epistle. Then, in 1718, he went with 
Lord Harcourt to Oxfordshire, where befell that 
pretty tragedy of the two haymakers struck 



266 Miscellanies. 

dead by lightning, which sentimental Mr. Pope 
made the subject of a fine and famous letter to 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who, unluckily 
for sentiment, received it in anything but a sen- 
timental spirit. Both the journeys to Aix and 
Exeter were reprinted in the grand quarto edi- 
tion of Gay's poems which Tonson and Lintott 
published in 1720, with a frontispiece by the 
eminent William Kent, and with a list of sub- 
scribers rivalling in number and exceeding in 
interest that prefixed to the Prior of 17 18. 
Those munificent patrons of literature, the Earl 
of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, took 
fifty copies each I In the second volume were 
included a number of epistles and miscellaneous 
pieces, many of which were published for the 
first time, as well as a new pastoral tragedy 
called "Dione." One of the ballads, "Sweet 
William's Farewell to Black Ey'd Susan," was 
long popular, and is still justly ranked among 
the best efforts of the writer's muse. Of the 
thousand pounds which Gay cleared over this 
venture his friends hoped he would make provi- 
dent use, suggesting purchase of an annuity, 
investment in the funds, and so forth. But 
Craggs had given him some South Sea Stock, 
and to this he added his new windfall, becom- 
ing in short space master of;^20,ooo. Again 



John Gay. 261 

his well-wishers clustered about him with pru- 
dent counsels. At least, said Fenton, secure 
as much as will make you certain " of a clean 
shirt, and a shoulder of mutton every day." 
But the '' most refractory, honest, good-natur'd 
man," as Swift calls him, was not to be so 
advised. He was seized with the South Sea mad- 
ness, and promptly lost both principal and profits. 
Among the other names on the subscription 
list of the volumes of ^720 are two which have 
a special attraction in Gay's life, for they are 
those of his kindest friends, the Duke and 
Duchess of Queensberry. The lady was the 
charming and wayward Catharine Hyde, — the 
" Kitty " whose first appearance at Drury Lane 
playhouse as a triumphant beauty of eighteen 
Prior had celebrated in some of his brightest 
and airiest verses, and whose picture, as a 
milkmaid of quality, painted by Charles Jervas 
at a later date, is to be seen at the National 
Portrait Gallery. As already stated, Gay had 
written of her sister Jane (by this time Countess 
of Essex) as far back as 1714; and it maybe 
that her own acquaintance with him dated from 
the same period. In any case, after her mar- 
riage to the Duke of Queensberry in 1720, she 
appears to have taken Gay under her protection. 
"He [Gay] is always with the Duchess of 



262 Miscellanies. 

Queensberry" — writes Mrs. Bradshaw to Mrs. 
Howard in 1721 ; and five years afterwards the 
poet himself tells Swift that he has been with 
his patrons in Oxfordshire and at Petersham 
and " wheresoever they would carry me." In 
the interval he is helping Congreve to nurse his 
gout "at the Bath,'' or living almost altogether 
with Lord Burlington at Chiswick or Piccadilly 
or Tunbridge Wells, or acting as secretary to 
Pope at Twickenham (" which you know is no 
idle charge"), or borrowing sheets from Jervas 
to entertain Swift in those lodgings which had 
been granted to him by the Earl of Lincoln, 
and were taken from him by Sir Robert Wal- 
pole. It says much for the charm of his char- 
acter that he knew how to acquire and how to 
retain friends so constant and so diverse. But 
though his life sounds pleasant in the summary, 
it must have involved humiliations which would 
have been intolerable to a more independent 
man. According to Arbuthnot, the Burling- 
tons sometimes left their protdgd in want of the 
necessaries of life, and neither they nor his 
other great friends were very active to procure 
him preferment. ''They wonder," says Gay 
piteously to Swift in 1722, " at each other for 
not providing for me ; and ^I wonder at them 
all." From a letter which he wrote to Pope 



John Gay. 263 

two years later, it is nevertheless plain that 
somebody had given him a lottery commissioner- 
ship worth ;^i 50 per annum, so that, for a man 
whose claims were not urgent, he can hardly 
be said to have been culpably neglected. 

Previously to his appointment as a lottery 
commissioner he had been seriously ill. The 
loss of his South Sea Stock preyed upon his 
spirits; and his despondency "being attended 
with the cholic " — in the unvarnished language 
of the " Biographia Britannica " — "brought 
his life in danger." Upon his recovery, and 
pending the postponed advancement he was 
always "lacking" ("the Court keeps him at 
hard meat," wrote Swift in 1725), he produced 
-another play, "The Captives," which ran for 
a week in January, 1724, the third or author's 
night being expressly commanded by his old 
patrons, the Prince and Princess of Wales. 
Then at the request of the Princess, he set to 
work upon the " Fables " by which his reputa- 
tion as a writer mainly survives. '^Gay is 
writing Tales for Prince William/' Pope tells 
Swift. After many delays, partly in production 
by the press, partly owing to Gay's own dilatory 
habits, the first series appeared in 1727,^ and 

1 A second series of sixteen fables was published in 
1738, after his death, from the manuscripts in the hands of 
the Duke of Queensberry. 



264 Miscellanies. 

was well received, although, if Swift is to be 
believed, their " nipping turns" upon courtiers 
were not best welcomed where the poet most 
needed encouragement. To this it is perhaps 
to be attributed that when George II, came at 
last to the throne nothing better was found for 
Gay than the post of gentleman-usher to the 
little Princess Louisa — a child under three. 
By this time he was more than forty, and he 
had self-respect enough to think himself too 
old. He therefore politely declined the nomina- 
tion. With this, however, his long deferred 
expectations finally vanished. " I have no 
prospect," he wrote with tardy sagacity to 
Swift, " but in depending wholly upon myself, 
and my own conduct. As I am used to dis- 
appointments, I can bear them ; but as I can 
have no more hopes, I can no more be disap- 
pointed, so that I am in a blessed con- 
dition." 

Strangely enough, when he penned this in 
October, 1727, he had already completed what 
was to be his greatest dramatic success, the 
famous " Beggar's Opera," which, produced at 
Lincoln's Inn Fields on the 29th of January, 
1728, for a season overthrew Italian song, — 
" that Dagon of the Nobility and Gentry, who 
had so long seduced them to idolatry," as the 



John Gajr. 26^ 

*' Companion to the Playhouse " puts it, — and 
made its Author's name a household word. 
How it first occurred to Swift what "an 
odd pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pastoral 
might make ; " how friends hesitated, and Gibber 
rejected, and the public rapturously applauded ; 
how it was sung at street corners, and painted 
on screens; how it procured its " Polly "_— 7 
(Lavinia Fenton) a coronet, and made Rich / 
(the manager) gay, and Gay (the author) rich — / 
all these things are the commonplaces of litera- 
ture. At Mr. John Murray's in Albemarle 
Street may still be seen one of the three pic- 
tures which William Hogarth painted of that all 
conquering company, and which, years after- 
wards, was engraved by another William — 
William Blake. The Goryphseus of the high- 
way (Walker) appears in the centre, while 
" Lucy" (Mrs. Egleton) pleads for him to the 
left, and " Polly" (Miss Fenton) to the right. 
Scandal, in the person of John, Lord Hervey, 
adds that the opera owed a part of its popularity 
to something in the dilemma of Macheath " be- 
tween his twa Deborahs " which irresistibly 
suggested the equally equivocal position of 
Walpole between his wife and his mistress. 
This is probably exaggerated, as is also the aid 
which Gay is reported to have received from 



266 Miscellanies. 

Pope and others,^ but it accounts in a measure 
for the fate which befell Gay's next enterprise. 

That some attempt to perpetuate so signal 
a success as the *' Beggar's Opera " should not 
be made was scarcely in the nature of things ; 
and Gay set speedily about the preparation of 
a sequel, to which he gave the name of the 
popular heroine of the earlier piece. But 
^' Polly" was saved from the common fate of 
continuations by the drastic action of the Lord 
Chamberlain, taken, it is surmised, upon the 
instruction of Walpole. When it was almost 
ready for rehearsal, the representation was pro- 
hibited. The result of this not very far-sighted 
step on the part of the authorities was of course 
to invest its publication as a book with an un- 
precedented and wholly fictitious interest. 
Friends on all sides, and especially those op- 
posed to the Court, strained every nerve to 
promote the sale. The Duchess of Marlborough 
(Congreve's Henrietta) gave ;^ioo for a copy ; 
and the Duchess of Queensberry, who had the 
temerity to solicit subscriptions within the very 
precincts of St. James's, was forbidden to return 

1 Pope — " semper ar denies acuens sagittas " — was sup- 
posed to have pointed some of the songs. But he told 
Spence that neither he nor Swift gave any material aid in 
the work ("Anecdotes," 1858, pp. no, 120). 



John Gaf. 267 

to them. Thereupon the Duke, nothing loth, 
threw up his appointments, as Vice Admiral of 
Scotland and Lord of the Bedchamber, and 
followed his lady, who delivered a Parthian 
shaft in the shape of a very indiscreet and 
saucy letter to His Majesty King George. In 
all this, it is plain that Gay's misfortune was 
simply made the instrument of political antag- 
onisms : but, for the moment, his name was 
on^ every lip. ^' The inoffensive John Gaf " — 
writes Arbuthnot to Swift under date of March 
19, 1729 — " is now become one of the obstruc- 
tions to the peace of Europe, the terror of the 
ministers, the chief author of the Craftsman, 
and all the seditious pamphlets, which have 
been published against the Government. He 
has got several turned out of their places ; the 
greatest ornament of the court banished from 
it for his sake ; ^ another great lady [Mrs. 
Howard] in danger of being Chassd [5ic] like- 
wise ; about seven or eight duchesses pressing 
forward, like the antient circumcelliones in the 
church, who shall suffer martyrdom on his ac- 
count first. He is the darling of the city . . . 
I can assure you, this is the very identical 

1 " The gay Amanda let us now behold, 
In thy Defence, a lovely banished Scold." 

" The Female Faction," 1729. 



268 Miscellanies. 

John Gay, whom you formerly knew, and 
lodged with in Whitehall two years ago." The 
gross result was that Gay gained about ;^i20o 
by the publication of " Polly " as a six shilling 
quarto, of which Bowyer, the printer, in one 
year struck off 10,500 copies; by the repre- 
sentation of the "Beggar's Opera" he had 
made, according to his own account, " between 
;^7oo and ;^8oo " to Rich's ;^400o. 

During a great part of 1728 Gay resided at 
Bath with the Duchess of Marlborough. After 
the prohibition of " Polly," he appears, as 
usual, to have fallen ill, and to have been tenderly 
nursed by Arbuthnot. " I may say, without 
vanity, his life, under God, is due to the 
unwearied endeavors and care of your humble 
servant," writes this devoted friend to Swift. 
Then the Queensberrys took formal charge 
of John Gay and henceforth he lived either at 
their town house in Burlington Gardens (where 
now stands the Western Branch of the Bank 
of England), or at their pleasant country seat of 
Amesbury in Wiltshire. The Duke kept the 
poet's money ; the Duchess watched over the 
poet and his wardrobe.-^ " I was a long time," 

1 In these characteristics Gay seems to have imitated 
La Fontaine, who, after living twenty years with Mme. 
de la Sabliere, passed at her death to the care of M. 



John Gay. 269 

he says in 1730, '^ before I could prevail with her 
to let me allow myself a pair of shoes with two 
heels ; for I had lost one, and the shoes were 
so decayed, that they were not worth mending." 
Elsewhere it is — " I am ordered by the duchess 
to grow rich in the manner of Sir John Cutler.'^ 
I have nothing, at this present writing, but my 
frock that was made at Salisbury, and a bob- 
perriwig." In an earlier paper in these volumes ^ 
we have given some account of the joint letters 
which at this period Gay and his kind protect- 
ress wrote to Swift in Ireland, and they present 
a most engaging picture of the alliance between 
the author of "The Hare and Many Friends" 
and the grande dame de par le monde of the 
last century. Most of them were written from 
Amesbury (where nothing but a summer house 
now remains of the buildings as they were in 
Gay's time), and their main theme is the invita- 

and Mme. de Hervart. " D'autres prenaient soin de lui " 
■ — says M. Taine. "II se donnait h ses amis, sentant 
bien qu'il ne pouvait pourvoir a lui-meme. Mme. 
d'Hervart, jeune et charmante, veilla k tout, jusqu'a ses 
vetements," etc. ..." Ses autres amis faisaient de 
meme." Are all fabulists congenitally feckless ? 

1 Cf. Pope's Epistle "Of the Use of Riches," 11. 

315-34- 

2 See "Prior's Kitty," in "Eighteenth Century Vig- 
nettes," First Series. 



270 Miscellanies. 

tion of Swift to England. The final epistle of 
the series is dated November 16, 1732 ; and in 
this Gay reports that he has " come to London 
before the family to follow his own inventions," 
which included the production of his recently 
written Opera of " Achilles." A few days later, 
he was attacked by a constitutional malady to 
which he had long been subject, and died on 
the 4th of December. After lying in state in 
Exeter Change, he was (says Arbuthnot, who 
had again nursed and attended him) '* interred 
at Westminster- Abbey, as if he had been 
a peer of the realm ;" and the Queensberrys 
erected a handsome monument to his memory. 
By other friends he was mourned as sincerely, 
if not as sumptuously. Pope, who had always 
loved him, felt a genuine sorrow, and five days 
elapsed before Swift at Dublin could summon 
courage to open the boding letter which an- 
nounced his death. His fortune, of which his 
patrons had made themselves the voluntary 
stewards, amounted to about ;^6ooo. It was 
divided between his sisters, Mrs. Bailer and 
Mrs. Fortescue. 

His last letter to Swift had ended : — " Be- 
lieve me, as I am, unchangeable in the regard, 
love and esteem I have for you." The words 
reveal the chief source of his personal charm. 



John Gay. 271 

He was thoroughly kindly and affectionate, 
with just that touch of clinging in his character, 
and of helplessness in his nature, which, when 
it does not inspire contempt (and Gay's parts 
saved him from that), makes a man the spoiled 
child of men and the playfellow of women. 
He had his faults, it is true : he was as indolent as 
Thomson, as fond of fine clothes as Goldsmith ; 
as great a gourmand as La Fontaine. That he 
was easily depressed, was probably due in a 
measure to his inactive life and his uncertain 
health. But at his best, he must have been 
a delightfully soothing and unobtrusive com- 
panion — invaluable for fStes and gala days, and 
equally well adapted for the half lights and 
unrestrained intercourse of familiar life. "You 
will never " — writes Swift to the Duchess of 
Queensberry, *' be able to procure another so 
useful, so sincere, so virtuous, so disinterested, 
so entertaining, so easy, and so humble a friend, 
as that person whose death all good men lament." 
The praise is high, but there is little doubt that 
it was genuine. Pope's antithetical epitaph, 
despite the terrible mangling it has received at 
the hands of Johnson, may also be quoted : — 

" Of manners gentle, of affections mild ; 
In wit a man ; simplicity a child ; 
With native humour temp'ring virtuous rage, 
Formed to delight at once and lash the age : 



272 Miscellanies. 

Above temptation, in a low estate, 
And uncorrupted, e'en among the great : 
A safe companion, and an easy friend, 
Unblamed through life, lamented in thy end, 
These are thy honours ! not that here thy bust 
Is mixed with heroes, or with kings thy dust. 
But that the worthy and the good shall say, 
Striking their pensive bosoms — Here lies Gay." 

The monument in Westminster Abbey, for 
which the above was composed, bears, in 
addition, a flippant couplet of Gay's own which 
can only have been — as indeed it is stated to 
have been — the expression of a passing mood. 

To attempt any detailed examination of Gay's 
works is unnecessary. Those which are most 
likely to attract the nineteenth century reader 
have been mentioned in the course of the fore- 
going pages. Stripped of the adventitious cir- 
cumstances which threw the halo of notoriety 
around them, his two best known plays remain of 
interest chiefly for their songs, ^ which have all 

1 One of the couplets of the "Beggar's Opera" bids 
fair to live as long as Buridan's two bundles of hay. " How 
happy could I be with either. Were t'other dear Charmer 
away ! " — was, not long since, employed by Sir William 
Harcourt in the House to illustrate a political dilemma. 
Whereupon Mr. Goschen neatly turned the laugh upon 
the Leader of the Opposition by continuing the quotation 
— "But while you thus tease me together, To neither a 
word will I say ! " 



John Gay. 273 

the qualities songs possess when the writer, 
besides being a poet, is a musician as well. 
This lyric faculty is also present in all Gay's 
lesser pieces, and is as manifest in the ballad on 
Molly Mog of the " Rose " Inn at Wokingham, 
as in " Black-Ey'd Susan " or *''Twas when 
the Seas were roaring." In his longer poems 
he is always happiest when he is most un- 
constrained and natural, or treads the terra 
firma of the world he knows. The " Fan," the 
miscellaneous " Eclogues/' the "Epistles," are 
all more or less forced and conventional. But 
exceptions occur even in these. There is a 
foretaste of Fielding in " The Birth of the 
Squire; " and the " Welcome from Greece," in 
which he exhibits Pope's friends assembling to 
greet him after his successful translation of the 
" Iliad," has a brightness and vivacity of move- 
ment, which seems to be the result of an 
unusually fresh inspiration. It is written, more- 
over, in an ottava rima stanza far earlier than 
Tennant's or Frere's or Byron's. The " Tales " 
are mediocre, and generally indelicate ; the 
'• Translations " have no special merit. In the 
" Fables " Gay finds a more congenial vocation. 
The easy octosyllabic measure, not packed and 
idiomatic like Swift's, not light and ironical like 
Prior's, but ambling, colloquial, and even a 
18 



274 Miscellanies. 

little down-at-heel, after the fashion of the bard 
himself, suited his habits and his Muse. An 
uncompromising criticism might perhaps be in- 
clined to hint that these little pieces are by no 
means faultless ; that they are occasionally 
deficient in narrative art, that they lack real 
variety of theme, and that they are often 
wearisome, almost unmanly, in their querulous 
insistence on the vices of servility and the 
hollowness of Courts. On the other hand, it 
must be admitted that they are full of good 
nature and good sense ; and if not characterised 
by the highest philosophical wisdom, show 
much humorous criticism of life and practical 
observation of mankind. They have, too, some 
other recommendations, which can scarcely be 
ignored. They have given pleasure to several 
generations of readers, old and young ; and they 
have enriched the language with more than one 
indispensable quotation. " While there is life, 
there 's Hope," " When a Lady 's in the Case," 
and " Two of a Trade can ne'er agree," — are 
still part of the current coin of conversation. 



AT LEICESTER FIELDS. 

IT is with places as with persons ; they often 
attract us more in their youth than in their 
maturer years. Apart from the fact that these 
papers are mainly confined to the Eighteenth 
Century, this threadbare truth affords a sufficient 
excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by its 
earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, 
indeed, the abiding interest of the locality lies 
less in the present than in the past. Not even 
the addition to the inclosure of busts and a 
Shakespeare fountain has been able to regener- 
ate entirely the Leicester Square that most of 
us remember, with its gloomy back streets, — 
its fringe of dingy cafds and restaurants, — its 
ambiguous print- and curiosity-shops, — its in- 
corrigibly-unacclimatised Alhambra, whose gar- 
ish Saracenic splendours scale and peel per- 
petually in London's imber edax. If we call 
anything forcibly to mind in connection with 
the spot, it is a certain central statue, long the 
mock of the irreverent, — a statue of the first 
George, which had come of old, gilded and 



276 Miscellanies. 

magnificent, from '' Timon's Villa "at Canons, 
to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, 
to be rudely spotted with sacrilegious paint, to 
be crowned with a fool's cap, and, finally, to 
present itself to the spectator in the generally 
dishonoured and dilapidated condition in which, 
some twenty years ago, it was exhibited by the 
late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal 
Academy. But when, travelling rapidly back- 
wards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past 
Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Bur- 
ford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's Needle- 
work, we enter the last century, we are in the 
Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of 
Newton and John Hunter, — the Leicester 
Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, 
Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. 
This is the Leicester Fields of which we pro- 
pose to speak. Leicester Square and its noto- 
rieties may be left to the topographers of the 
future.^ 

1 The name "Leicester Squaie" — it is but right to say 
— is also of fairly early date. In " A Journey through 
England," 4th ed., 1724, i. 178, the writer, speaking of the 
space before Leicester House, says: "This was till these 
Fourteen Years always called Leicester Fields, but now 
Leicester Square." There is, however, abundant evidence 
that the older name continued to be freely used through- 
out the century. For example, in 1783, Mrs. Hogarth's 



At Leicester Fields. 277 

It is in Ralph Agas his survey of 1^92 (or 
rather in Mr. W. H. Overall's excellent fac- 
simile) that we make our first acquaintance 
with the Fields, then really entitled to their 
name. According to Agas, the ground to the 
north-west of Charing Cross, and immediately 
to the east of the present Whitcomb Street (at 
that time Hedge Lane), was formerly open pas- 
ture land, occupied — in the plan — by a pair of 
pedestrians larger than life, a woman laying out 
clothes, and tv/o nondescript quadrupeds, of 
which one is broken-backed beyond the licence 
of deformity. The only erections to be discov- 
ered are the King's Mews, clustering together 
for company at the back of the Cross. Sixty 
years later, judging from the map known gener- 
ally as Faithorne's, the ground had become 
more populated. To the right of St. Martin's 
Lane, it is thickly planted with buildings ; to 
the left also a line of houses is springing up and 
creeping northward, while in the open space 
above referred to stand a couple of lordly man- 
sions. One, on a site which must have lain to 
the north of the present Little Newport Street, 
is Newport House, the town residence of 

house is advertised as " TJie Golden Head in Leicester 
Fields" and it is " at his house in Leicester Fields^''' in 1792, 
that Malone makes Reynolds die. 



278 Miscellanies. 

Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport ; the other, 
which occupies ground now traversed by Lei- 
cester Place, is Leicester House. Its garden 
at the back extended across the eastern end of 
Lisle Street, and its boundary wall to the north 
was also the southern boundary wall of the old 
Military Garden where King James's son. Prince 
Henry of Wales — whose gallant and martial 
presentment you shall see figured in the fore 
front of Michael Drayton's " Poly-Olbion/' — 
had been wont to exercise his troops, and make 
the now-discredited welkin ring with the shoot- 
ing-off of chambers, with alarums, and points 
of war. 

Leicester House the first was built about 
1632-6 by Robert Sydney, second Earl of 
Leicester, the father of Algernon Sydney, and 
of that beautiful Dorothy, afterwards Countess 
of Sunderland, whom Van Dyck painted, and 
Waller '' Petrarchised " as Sacharissa. The site 
(Swan Close) ^ was what is known as Lammas- 
land, and from the Overseers' Books of the 
Parish of St. Martin's in the Fields, the Earl 
seems not only to have paid " Lammas " for " the 

i Cunningham failed to identify Swan Close. But 
from a letter in the State Paper Office, quoted in " Temple 
Bar " for June, 1874, it would seem that this was the actual 
site of the building. 



At Leicester Fields. 279 

ground that adjoins to the Military Wall," but 
also ' ' for the field that is before his house " — i. e. 
Leicester Fields. This latter probably extended 
to the present Orange Street, so that the grounds 
of the old mansion may be roughly said to be 
bounded by the Mews on the south, and by the 
Military Garden on the north. Few memories 
cling about the place which belong to Lord 
Leicester's lifetime. When not engaged in em- 
bassies and the like, he was absent at his other 
and more famous seat of Penshurst in Kent, and 
Leicester House was " To Let." One of the 
earliest of its illustrious tenants was that quon- 
dam "Queen of Hearts" (as Howell calls her), 
the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, who, 
already smitten with her last illness, died there in 
February, 1662, after a few days' residence, " in 
the arms" (says Evelyn) ^^of her nephew the 
King" [Charles II.]. Another tenant, some 
years later, was Charles Colbert, Marquis de 
Croissy, the French Ambassador, a brother of 
Louis the Fourteenth's famous minister and 
financier ; and Pepys records, under date of 
2ist October, 1668, that he was to have taken 
part in a deputation from the Royal Society to 
Lord Leicester's distinguished lessee. But hav- 
ing unhappily been " mighty merry" at a house- 
warming of his friend Batelier, he arrived too 



28o Miscellanies. 

late to accompany the rest, and was fain to 
console himself (and perhaps to do penance) by 
carrying his wife to Cow Lane, Smithfield, in 
order to inspect a proposed new coach, with the 
splendours of which ^' she is outof herself for joy 
almost," although, from the sequel, it was not 
the one ultimately purchased. 

Pepys, as will be seen, did not actually enter 
Leicester House, at all events upon this occa- 
sion. His brother diarist was more fortunate. 
Going in October, 1672, to take leave of the 
second Lady Sunderland (Sacharissa's daughter- 
in-law), whose husband had already set out as 
ambassador to Paris, grave John Evelyn vv^as 
entertained by Her Ladyship with the perform- 
ances of Richardson the fire-eater, who, in those 
days, enjoyed a vogue sufficient to justify the 
record of his prowess in the ^'Journal des S^a- 
vans " for 1680. "He devoured brimston on 
glowing coales before us," says Evelyn, " chew- 
ing and swallowing them ; he mealted a beere- 
glasse and eate it quite up ; then taking a live 
coale on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, 
the coal was blown on with bellows till it flam'd 
and sparkl'd in his mouth, and so remain'd till 
the oyster gaped and was quite boil'd ; then he 
mealted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he 
drank downe as it flam'd ; I saw it flaming in his 



At Leicester Fields. 281 

mouth a good while ; he also tooke up a thick 
piece of yron, such as laundresses use to put in 
their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, 
held it betweene his teeth, then in his hand, and 
threw it about like a stone, but this I observed 
he car'd not to hold very long ; then he stood 
on a small pot, and bending his body, tooke a 
glowing yron with his mouth from betweene 
his feete, without touching the pot or ground 
with his hands ; with divers other prodigious 
feates." ^ 

Lord Leicester closed a long life in 1677, ^^^ 
many other tenants afterwards occupied the 
mansion in the Fields. Under Anne it was the 
home of the German Ambassador, or " Imperial 
Resident," who lived in it far into the reign of 
the first George. At this time, judging from a 
water-colour bird's-eye view in the Grace Collec- 
tion at the British Museum, it was a long two- 
storied building, with attics above, a court- 
yard in front, and a row of small shops or stalls 
extending on either side of its entrance gate. 
Behind came the garden, stretching northward, 
and decorated in the Dutch fashion with formal 
trees and statues. Hither, on a Saturday in 
January, 171 2, conveyed unostentatiously in a 

1 "Memoirs of John Evelyn," etc., 1827, ii. pp. 375-6. 



282 Miscellanies. 

hackney coach from Whitehall Stairs, came 
Eugene of Savoy, who, by desire of the Emperor 
Charles VI., had just crossed from the Hague 
in Her Majesty's "Yacht 'Pubs'" (Captain 
Desborough), with the intention of preventing, 
if possible, what Prior calls that " vile Utrecht 
Treaty." His mission was to be fruitless from 
the outset, for at the Nore he was greeted with 
the news of Marlborough's disgrace, and his 
presence in England had little or no effect upon 
the pending proposals for peace. But for two 
months he was to be feted and lionised by the 
nobility in a way which — modest warrior and 
discreet diplomatist as he was — must have taxed 
his resources as much as a campaign in Flanders. 
His admirers mobbed him on all occasions. " I 
could not see Prince Eugene at court to-day," — 
writes Swift to Mrs. Johnson at Dublin, — "the 
crowd was so great. The Whigs contrive to 
have a crowd always about him, and employ the 
rabble to give the word when he sets out from 
anyplace." Elsewhere Swift had said — " I hope 
and believe he comes too late to do the Whigs 
any good." At first His Highness's appearance 
prepossessed him. He is not ill-looking, " but 
well enough, and a good shape." Later on^ he 
has revised his opinion. " I saw Prince Eugene 
at court to-day very plain. He is plaguy yellow, 



At Leicester Fields. 283 

and literally ugly besides." A great Tory lady, 
Lady Strafford (wife of that haughty Envoy to 
the Hague who declined to serve with Prior in 
the Utrecht negotiations) goes farther still. She 
calls him — her Ladyship spells far worse than 
Stella — a " frittfuU creature," and adds, *' the 
Ladys here dont admire Prince Eugene, for he 
seemes to take very little notis of them," — a 
sentiment in which we may perhaps detect a 
spice of the ^^ spreice injuria for mce.''' 

Much, indeed, depends upon the point of view, 
political and otherwise. To Steele, with his 
military instincts and quick enthusiasm, the great 
Captain, who surprised Cremona and forced the 
trenches of Turin, comes surrounded with an 
aura of hyperbole. " He who beholds him," he 
writes in '^ Spectator," No. 340, " will easily ex- 
pect from him anything that is to be imagined 
or executed by the Wit or Force of Man. The 
Prince is of that Stature which makes a Man 
most easily become all Parts of Exercise ; has 
Height to be graceful on Occasions of State and 
Ceremony, and no less adapted for Agility and 
Dispatch; His Aspect is erect and composed; 
his Eye lively and thoughtful, yet rather vigilant 
than sparkling : His Action and Address the 
most easy imaginable, and his Behaviour in an 
Assembly peculiarly graceful in a certain Art of 



284 Miscellanies. 

mixing insensibly with the rest, and becoming 
one of the Company, instead of receiving the 
Courtship of it. The Shape of his Person, and 
Composure of his Limbs, are remarkably exact 
and beautiful." Burnet, as staunch a Whig as 
Steele, writes more moderately to the same 
effect. " I had the honour to be admitted at 
several times, to much discourse with him ; his 
Character is so universally known, that I will 
say nothing of him, but from what appeared to 
myself. He has a most unaffected Modesty, 
and does scarcely bear the Acknowledgments, 
that all the World pay him : He descends to an 
easy Equality with those, with whom he con- 
verses ; and seems to assume nothing to himself, 
while he reasons with others: He was treated 
with great respect by both Parties ; but he put 
a distinguished Respect on the Duke of Marl- 
borough, with whom he passed most of his Time.^ 
The Queen used him civilly^ but not with the 
Distinction, that was due to his high Merit : 
Nor did he gain much ground with the Minis- 
ters." ^ 

1 It was for Marlborough, no doubt, that the Prince 
sat to Kneller. The portrait, in which he wears the 
Order of the Golden Fleece over a rich coat of armour, 
and holds a marshal's baton, was mezzotinted by John 
Simon in 1712. 

2 " History of His Own Time," ii. (1734), pp. 589-90. 



At Leicester Fields. 285 

Eugene's stay at Leicester House was brief; 
but it must have been fully occupied. *' Je 
caressais beaucoup les gens en place," he writes 
in his " M6moires,"and it is clear that, however 
attentive he may have been to his fallen comrade- 
in-arms of Blenheim and Oudenarde, he did not 
omit to pay assiduous court to those in power. 
"He has been every day entertain'd at some great 
man's/' says gossiping Peter Wentworth. Lord 
Portland gives him " dinner, musick and a danc- 
ing" all at once ; the Duke of Shrewsbury has 
Nicolini to sing for him ; the Duke of Bucking- 
ham turns out the militia in his honour. And so 
forth. He, in his turn, was not backward in re- 
sponding. " Prince Eugene," says Lady Strafford, 
" has given an order to six ladys and six men. 
The ladys are the four Marlborough daughters 
and the Duchess of Bolton and Lady Berkely. 
'T is a medall — Cupid on won side with a sword 
in won hand and a fann in the othere, and the 
othere side is Cupid with a bottle in his hand 
with a sword run through it. And the motto's 
are in French which I dare not write to you but 
the English is * won don't hinder the othere' 
[" L'un n'emp^che pas I'autre "]." He had ar- 
rived in London on January 5, and he returned to 
Holland on March 17, carrying with him nothing 
but the diamond hilted sword (" very rich and 



286 Miscellanies. 

genteele, and the diamonds very white," says Lord 
Berkeley of Stratton), which, at a cost of ;^5ooo, 
had been presented to him by Queen Anne.^ 
After this Leicester House continued to be the 
home of the German Resident, apparently one 
Hoffmann, whom Swift calls a '' puppy." But he 
had also called Hoflfmann's predecessor, Count 
Gallas, a " fool," and too much importance may 
easily be attached to these mere flowers of speech. 
About 1718, the house, being again to let, was 
bought for;^6ooo by George Augustus, Prince of 
Wales, who had quarrelled with his father ; and 
a residence of the Princes of Wales it continued 
for forty years to come. 

This was perhaps the gayest time in its history. 

1 If he received royal gifts, he was also princely in his 
acknowledgments. According to Hearne (Doble, 1889, 
iii. 329), he paid twenty guineas for Joshua Barnes's quarto 
"Homer" of 1711, and fifteen guineas for Whiston's 
" Heretical Book." He also paid thirty guineas for Samuel 
Clarke's edition of " Caesar's Commentaries (Tonson, 
171 2)," then just published with a magnificent portrait of 
Marlborough, to whom it was dedicated. A large paper 
copy of this, sumptuously bound, fetched sixteen guineas 
at Dr. Mead's sale of 1754-5; but though it is praised by 
Addison in " Spectator," No. 367, as doing " Honour to the 
E7igJish Press," Eugene certainly gave too much. Prob- 
ably he meant to do so. " Je fis des presens," he says 
("Memoires," 181 1, p. 107) ; " car," he adds significantly, 
" on achete beaucoup en Angleterre." 



At Leicester Fields, 287 

From the precision and decorum of St. James's, 
people flocked eagerly to the drawing-rooms and 
receptions of Leicester House, where the fiddles 
were always going. " Balls, assemblies and mas- 
querades have taken the place of dull formal 
visiting," writes my Lord Chesterfield, " and the 
women are more agreeable triflers than they were 
designed. Puns are extremely in vogue, and the 
license very great. The variation of three or 
four letters in a word breaks no squares, inas- 
much, that an indifferent punster may make a 
very good figure in the best companies." He 
himself was one of the most brilliant luminaries 
of that brilliant gathering, delighting the Prince 
and Princess by his mimicry and his caustic 
raillery. Another was that eccentric Duchess of 
Buckingham, who passed for the daughter of 
James H. by Catharine Sedley, Countess of Dor- 
chester, and who always sat in a darkened cham- 
ber, in the deepest mourning, on the anniversary 
of King Charles's execution. Thus she was dis- 
covered by Lord Hervey, surrounded by ser- 
vants in sables, in a room hung with black, and 
lighted only by wax candles. But the most at- 
tractive figures of the Prince's Court are the 
youthful maids of honour, — charming, good- 
humoured Mary Bellenden, Mary Lepel (to 
whom an earlier paper in these volumes has 



288 Miscellanies. 

been devoted),^ and reckless and volatile Sophia 
Howe. Pope and Gay wrote them verses, — 
these laughing damsels, — and they are often 
under contemporary pens. Miss Bellenden mar- 
ried Colonel John Campbell, and became a 
happy wife ; the "■ beautiful Molly Lepel " paired 
off with John, Lord Hervey, whose pen-portrait 
by Pope exhausts the arts of " conscientious 
malevolence," while poor Sophia Howe fell in 
love, but did not marry at all, and died in 1726 
of a broken heart. 

When, in June, 1727, George H. passed from 
Leicester House to the throne of England, an- 
other Prince of Wales succeeded him, — though 
not immediately, — and maintained the traditions 
of an opposition Court. This was Frederick, 
Prince of Wales. Bubb Dodington, afterwards 
Lord Melcombe, was the Chesterfield of this 
new regime, and Miss Chudleigh and Lady Mid- 
dlesex, its Bellenden and Lepel. Political in- 
trigue alternated with gambling and theatricals. 
One of the habitues was the dancing master Des- 
noyers, whom Hogarth ridiculed ; and French 
comedians made holiday. " The town," says an 
historian of the Square, " was at this time full of 
gaiety — masquerades, ridottos, Ranelagh in full 

1 See " Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey," in " Eighteenth 
Century Vignettes/' Third Series, pp. 292-322. 



At Leicester Fields. 289 

swing, and the Prince a prominent figure at all, 
for he loved all sorts of diversion, from the 
gipsies at ^Norwood, the conjurors and fortune- 
tellers in the bye-streets about Leicester Fields, 
and the bull-baits at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to 
Amorevoli at the Opera, and the Faussans in the 
ballet. When the news came of the Duke of 
Cumberland having lost the battle of Fontenoy 
in May, 1745, the Prince was deep in prepara- 
tion for a performance at Leicester House of 
Congreve's masque of " The Judgment of Paris," 
in which he played Paris. He himself wrote a 
French song for the part, addressed to the three 
rival goddesses, acted by Lady Catherine Han- 
mer, Lady Fauconberg, and Lady Middlesex, 
the dame regnante of the time. It is in the high 
Regency vein : — 

** ' Venez, mes cheres Deesses, 

Venez, calmez mon chagrin ; 
Aidez, mes belles Princesses, 

A le noyer dans le vin. 
Poussons cette douce ivresse 

Jusqu'au milieu de la nuit, 
Et n'ecoutons que la tendresse 

D'un charmant vis-a-vis.' " 

** What signifies if Europe Has a tyrant more 
or less, So we but pray Calliope Our verse and 
song to bless " — proceeds this Anacreontic per- 
19 



290 Miscellanies. 

formance ; and Walpole copies out its entire five 
stanzas to send to Mann at Florence. They 
miscarry, he says, "in nothing but the language, 
the thoughts and the poetry," — a judgment 
which is needlessly severe. 

In March, 17^1, an end came to these light- 
hearted junketings, when His Royal Highness 
quitted the scene almost precipitately from the 
breaking of an abscess in his side, caused by the 
'blow of a cricket-ball at Cliveden. The Princess 
and her children continued to live in Leicester 
Fields until 1766. Meanwhile, to the accom- 
paniment of trumpets and kettledrums, the old 
house witnessed the proclamation of George HI., 
and the marriage, in its great drawing-room, of 
the Princess Augusta to Ferdinand, Hereditary 
Prince of Brunswick, one of the most popular 
heroes ever huzzaed to by an English mob. 
After this last occurrence, the only important 
event connected with royalty in the Fields is the 
death at Savile House on 29th December, 1765, 
of one of the princes. "The King's youngest 
brother, Prince Frederick," writes Walpole 
(with one of those Gallic affectations of phrase 
which roused the anger of Macaulay) " is dead 
of a dropsy and consumption : he was a pretty 
and promising boy." 

The Savile House above referred to stood 



At Leicester Fields. 291 

next to Leicester House on the west. Savile 
House, too, was not without its memories. It 
was here that Peter the Great had boozed with 
his pot companion, the Marquis of Caermarthen, 
who occupied it when the Czar made his famous 
visit to this country in 1698. More than one 
English home bore dirty testimony to the pas- 
sage of the imperial savage and his suite, the 
decorous dwelling of John Evelyn, in particular, 
at Sayes Court, Deptford, being made '^ right 
nasty." There is, however, no special record 
of any wrong to Savile House beyond the spill- 
ing, down the autocratic throat, of an " intoler- 
able deal of sack" and peppered brandy. In 
January, 1718, the house was taken by the 
Prince of Wales, and when, a little later, Lei- 
cester House was vacated by Lord Cower, a 
communication was opened between the two, 
the smaller being devoted to the royal children. 
It belonged originally to the Aylesbury family, 
and came through them to the Saviles, one of 
whom was the Sir George Savile who is by 
some supposed to have sat for Goldsmith's Mr. 
Burchell. Sir George was its tenant in the riots 
of '80, when (as Dickens has not failed to re- 
member/ in " Barnaby Rudge ") it was besieged 
by the rioters because he had brought in the 
Catholic Bill. *' Between Twelve and One 



292 Miscellanies. 

O'clock Yesterday morning [June 6th] " — says 
the " Public Advertiser " — "a large Body [of 
rioters] assembled before Sir George Savile's 
House in Leicester Fields, and after breaking 
all the Windows, destroyed some of the Furni- 
ture." They were finally dispersed by a party 
of the Horse Grenadier Guards, but not before 
they had torn up all the iron railings in front of 
the building, which they afterwards used effec- 
tively as weapons of offence. Burke, who had 
also supported the Bill, was only saved from a 
like fate by the exertions of sixteen soldiers 
who garrisoned his house in Charles Street, St. 
James's Square. With the later use of Savile 
House, as the home of Miss Linwood's Art 
Needlework, which belongs to the present 
century, this paper has nothing to do. 

Moreover, we are straying from Leicester 
House itself. Deserted of royalty, it passed into 
the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Ashton Lever 
(grand uncle of Charles Lever the novelist), who 
transferred to it in 1771 the miscellaneous collec- 
tion he had christened the " Holophusikon " — a 
name which did not escape the gibes of the pro- 
fessional jester. His omnium gatherum of natural 
objects and savage costumes was, nevertheless, 
a remarkable one, still more remarkable when 
regarded as the work of a single man. It filled 



At Leicester Fields. 293 

sixteen of the rooms at Leicester House, besides 
overflowing on the staircases, and included, not 
only all the curiosities Cook had brought home 
from his voyages, but also a valuable assortment 
of bows and arrows of all countries contributed 
by Mr. Richard Owen Cambridge of Twicken- 
ham.^ Its possessor had been persuaded that his 
treasures which, in their first home at Alkring- 
ton near Manchester, had enjoyed great popu- 
larity, would be equally successful in London. 
The result, however, did not justify the expec- 
tation (an admittance of <^s. ^d. per person must 
have been practically prohibitive), and poor Sir 
Ashton was ultimately " obligated " as Tony 
Lumpkin v^ould say, to apply to Parliament for 
power to dispose of his show, as a whole, by 
lottery. He estimated his outlay at ;^5o,ooo. 
Of 36,000 tickets issued at a guinea each, only 
8000 were taken up. The lottery vi^as drawn in 
March, 1786, and the winner was a Mr. Parkin- 
son, who transferred his prize to the Rotunda at 

1 See " Cambridge the Everything," in " Eighteenth 
Century Vignettes," Third Series, pp. 178-204. In an out- 
house of the " Holophusikon," it may be added, were ex- 
hibited (stuffed) Queen Charlotte's elephant and female 
zebra — two favourites of royalty, which, during their life- 
time, had enjoyed an exceptional, if not always enviable, 
notoriety. 



294 Miscellanies. 

the Southern or Surrey end of Blackfriars Bridge, 
changing its name to the Museum Leverianum. 
But it was foredoomed to misfortune, and in 
1806 was dispersed under the hammer. A few 
years after it had crossed the river, Leicester 
House in turn disappeared, being pulled down 
in 1790.^ In 1791 Lisle Street was continued 
across its garden ; and a little later still, Leices- 
ter Place traversed its site, running parallel to 
Leicester Street, which had existed long pre- 
viously, being described in 1720, " as ordinarily 
built and inhabited, except the west side, towards 
the Fields, where there is a very good house." 

Leicester Place and Leicester Street, — like 
Leicester Fields itself, — directly preserve the 
memory of what Pennant aptly calls the " pout- 
ing-place of Princes." But there are other 
traces of Leicester House in the nomenclature 
of the neighbourhood which had grown up about 
it. One of the family titles survives in " Lisle 
Street"; another in "Sidney Alley." Bear 
Street again recalls the Leicester crest, a bear 
and ragged staff, while Green Street (one side of 

1 A house in Lisle Street, looking down Leicester Place, 
still (1898) perpetuates the name, and bears on its facade 
in addition the words, " New Lisle Street, MDCCXCI." 
It is occupied by a foreign school or schools ("^ficoles 
de Notre Dame de France"). 



At Leicester Fields. 295 

which has been recently rebuilt), according to 
Wheatley and Cunningham, derives its name 
from the colour of the Leicester Mews, which 
stood to the south of the Fields. The central 
inclosure seems to have been first systematically 
laid out — though it had long been railed round 
— about 1737. Eleven years later arrived from 
Canons (Lord Burlington's seat at Edgeware) 
that famous equestrian statue of George L, 
which Londoners so well remember. At the 
time of its erection it was lavishly gilt, and was 
one of the popular sights of the Town. By some 
it was attributed to Buchard ; by others to Van 
Nost of Piccadilly, once a fashionable statuary (in 
lead) like Cheere of Hyde Park Corner. The 
horse was modelled upon that by Hubert Le Soeur 
which carries King Charles L at Charing Cross. 
Considering its prolonged patronage by roy- 
alty, Leicester Fields does not seem to have 
been particularly favoured by distinguished resi- 
dents. Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, once 
lived in Leicester Place, where in 1796 (on the 
east side) he built a little theatre, the Sans Souci ; 
and Woollett, of whose velvety engravings Mr. 
Louis Fagan, not many years ago, prepared an 
exhaustive catalogue, had also his habitat in 
Green Street (No. 11), from the leads of which 
he was wont — so runs the story — to discharge 



296 Miscellanies. 

a small cannon when he had successfully put 
the last touches to a " Battle of La Hogue," or 
a " Death of General Wolfe." Allan Ramsay (in 
his youth), Barry, and John Opie all once lodged 
in Orange Court (now Street); and here — at 
No. 13 — was born, of a shoemaker sire and a 
mother who cried oysters, into a life of many 
changing fortunes, that strange Thomas Hol- 
croft of the " Road to Ruin." In St. Martin's 
Street, next door to the Congregational Chapel 
on the east side, lived Sir Isaac Newton from 
1 7 10 until January, 1725, or two years before 
his death at Kensington. Few traditions, how- 
ever, connect the abstracted philosopher (he was 
nearing seventy when he came to the Fields) 
with the locality, beyond his visits to Princess 
Caroline at the great house opposite.^ But 

1 A so-called Observatory on the roof, now non-exist- 
ent, was for many years exhibited as Newton's. Recent 
authorities, however, contend that this was the fabrication 
of a later tenant. But it should be noted that Madame 
D'Arblay, who also lived in the house, and wrote novels 
in the room in question, seems to have had no doubts of 
the kind. She says (" Memoirs of Dr. Burney," 1832, i. 
290-1) that her father not only reverently repaired the 
Observatory when he entered upon his tenancy of 
No. 35 [in 1774], but went to the expense of practically 
reconstructing it when it was all but destroyed by the 
hurricane of 1778. 



At Leicester Fields. ic^y 

there was one member of his household, a few- 
years later, who must certainly have added to 
the attractions of the ordinary two-storied build- 
ing where he superintended the revision of the 
second and third editions of the " Principia." 
This was his kinswoman, — the " jolie nidce " of 
Voltaire, — the " famous witty Miss Barton" of 
the " Gentleman's Magazine." At this date she 
was " Super-intendant of his domestick Affairs " 
to Charles^ Earl of Halifax, who, dying in 171 5, 
left her ;^^ooo and a house, " as a Token " — 
so runs the bequest — "of the sincere Love, 
Affection, and Esteem I have long had for her 
Person, and as a small Recompence for the 
Pleasure and Happiness I have had in her Con- 
versation." This, taken in connection with the 
fact that, since 1706, she had been in receipt 
of an annuity of ;£200 a year, purchased in her 
uncle's name, but for which Halifax was 
trustee, has led to the conclusion that the rela- 
tion between the pair was something closer than 
friendship, and that, following other contempo- 
rary precedents, they were privately married.^ 

1 See " Newton : his Friend : and his Niece," 1885, by 
Professor Augustus de Morgan, which labours, with much 
digression, but with infinite ingenuity and erudition, to 
establish this satisfactory solution of a problem in which 
the good fame of Newton cannot be regarded as entirely 
unconcerned. 



298 Miscellanies. 

Be this as it may, Catherine Barton is also in- 
teresting as one of the group of gifted women to 
whom Swift extended the privilege of that half- 
patronising, half-playful, and wholly unconven- 
tional intimacy which is at once the attraction 
and the enigma of his relations with the other 
sex. He met her often in London, though not 
as often as he wished. "I love her better than 
any-one here," he tells Stella in April, 171 1, 
" and see her seldomer." He dines with her 
'* alone at her lodgings"; he goes with her to 
other houses ; and, Tory though he has become, 
endures her vivacious Whiggery. 

When, at Halifax's death^ Catherine Barton, 
in all probability, returned to her uncle's house, 
Swift had already gone back to Ireland, and 
there is no reason for supposing that, although 
he had lodgings " in Leicester Fields "in 171 1, 
he ever visited his friend in St. Martin's Street. 
In August, 17 17, Mrs. Barton married John 
Conduitt, M. P., Newton's successor as Master 
of the Mint, and when in town continued to re- 
side with her husband under Newton's roof. 
And though Halifax was dead, and Swift in 
exile, and Prior *' in the messenger's hand," 
there can be little doubt that during her brief 
widowhood(?) and second wifehood, those 
friends who had clustered about the former 



At Leicester Fields. 299 

toast of the Kit Cats must still have continued 
to visit her. The chairs of Lady Worsley and 
Lady Betty Germaine must often have waited 
in the narrow entrance to St. Martin's Street, 
while the ladies "disputed Whig and Tory" 
with Mrs. Conduitt, or were interrupted in their 
tite-^-tSie by Gay and his Duchess. After Sir 
Isaac — a long while after — the most notable 
tenant of the old house was Dr. Charles Burney, 
author of the " History of Music," and of 
Fanny Burney. Indeed, it was in this very 
building — with the unassuming little chapel on 
its right where " Rainy Day" Smith had often 
heard Toplady preach — that a mere girl in her 
teens — no, ungallant Mr. Croker discovered 
her to have been actually a young woman of 
five-and-twenty — wrote that " Evelina" which, 
in 1778, took the Town by storm. There were 
panelled rooms and a painted ceiling in the 
Newton-Burney house of yore, but it could 
scarcely be here that the little person whom in 
her graver moments Mrs. Piozzi nicknamed the 
"Lady Louisa of Leicester Square" danced 
round an unmetaphoric mulberry tree with de- 
light at her success in letters, as there are no 
traces of a garden. At present, in this quiet 
backwater of street traffic, where Burke and 
Johnson and Franklin and Reynolds all came 



300 Miscellanies. 

formerly to visit their favourite authoress, noth- 
ing is discoverable but a dingy tenement with 
dusty upper v^^indows, with a ground floor that 
is used as a day school, and a front of stucco'd 
red brick upon which the blue tablet of the 
Society of Arts has something of the forlorn effect 
of an order of merit upon a chimney-sweep. 

Turning out of St. Martin's Street on the 
north another tablet is discernible in the angle of 
the Fields to the right upon the comparatively 
modern red brick fagade of another school, 
known as Archbishop Tenison's. Here, at one 
of the many signs of the "Golden Head," lived 
William Hogarth.^ The golden head in his case 
was rudely carved by himself out of pieces of 
cork glued together, and represented Van Dyck. 
To this, says Nichols, succeeded a head in plas- 
ter ; and this again, when Nichols wrote in 1782, 
had been replaced by a bust of Newton. About 
the interior of the house very little seems to be 
known, but, as it was rated to the poor in 1756 
at ;£6o, it must have been fairly roomy. In the 
later days, when it formed part of the Sabloniere 

1 There was even another, in Hogarth's day, in the 
Fields itself. "At the Golden Head," on the south side 
(Hogarth's was on the east), lived Edward Fisher, the 
mezzotint engraver, to whom we owe so many brilliant 
plates after Reynolds. 



At Leicester Fields. 301 

Hotel, before the hotel made way for the exist- 
ing school, there were traditions of a studio, prob- 
ably far less authentic than those of Sir Isaac's 
observatory. Not many years after Hogarth 
first took the house, the square was laid out 
(it had long been railed in), and he is said to 
have been often seen walking in the inclosure, 
wrapped in his red roquelaure, with his hat cocked 
on one side like Frederick the Great. His 
stables, when he set up the fine coach which 
Charles Catton decorated for him with the 
famous Cyprian crest that figures at the bottom 
of " The Bathos," were in the Nag's Head Yard,^ 
Orange Street. He had — as we know — a 
country box at Chiswick ; but he was at home 
in Leicester Fields. His friends were about 
him. Kind old Captain Coram had lodgings 
somewhere in the neighbourhood ; Pine, the 
"Friar Pine" of "Calais Gate," lived in St. 
Martin's Lane ; beyond that, in Covent Garden 
and its vicinity, were George Lambert the scene 
painter, Saunders Welch the magistrate, Richard 
Wilson, Fielding, and a host of intimates. It 
was in Leicester Fields that Hogarth died. He 
had been driven there from Chiswick on the 

1 The site of the Nag's Head — an ancient and wooden- 
galleried inn — is now [1898] occupied by the new prem- 
ises of Messrs. Macmillan and Co. 



302 Miscellanies. 

25th of October, 1764, cheerful, but very weak. 
^' Receiving an agreeable letter from the Ameri- 
can Dr. Franklin,'' says Nichols, [he] " drew 
up a rough draught of an answer to it ; but go- 
ing to bed, he was seized with a vomiting, upon 
which he rung his bell with such violence that 
he broke it, and expired about two hours after- 
wards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who 
was called up on his being taken suddenly ill." 
He is buried in Chiswick churchyard, where 
some years subsequently a monument was 
erected to his memory, with a well-known 
epitaph by Garrick. After Hogarth's death 
his widow continued to keep up the " Golden 
Head/' and Mary Lewis sold his prints there. 
Richard Livesay, the engraver, was one of 
Widow Hogarth's lodgers, and the Scotch 
painter, Alexander Runciman, was another. If 
the house had any further notable occupants, 
they may be forgotten. 

Mrs. Hogarth herself died in 1789. Six years 
before her death she had a next-door neighbour 
in the Fields, who, in his way, was as illus- 
trious as Hogarth or Reynolds. This was John 
Hunter, who, in 1783, became the tenant of 
No. 28,^ and at once began extending it back- 

1 Now rebuilt by the Alhambra Company as part of 
their premises. 



At Leicester Fields. 303 

ward towards Castle Street (now the Charing 
Cross Road) to receive his famous museum of 
Comparative and Pathological Anatomy. Ho- 
garth had then been dead for nearly twenty 
years ; and it is unlikely that the painter knew 
much of the young surgeon who was subse- 
quently to become so celebrated ; but he was 
probably acquainted with his brother, William 
Hunter of Covent Garden, who attended Field- 
ing in 1754. William Hunter had just died 
when John Hunter came to Leicester Fields. 
John lived there ten years in the height of his 
activity and fame, and it was during this period 
that Reynolds painted that portrait of him in a 
reverie (now in the Council Room of the Col- 
lege of Surgeons), which was engraved by 
William Sharp. He survived Sir Joshua but 
one year. 

The house of Reynolds was at the opposite 
side of the Square, at No. 47, now Puttick and 
Simpson's auction rooms. He occupied it from 
1760 to 1792. We are accustomed to think of 
Hogarth and Reynolds as contemporaries. But 
Reynolds was in the pride of his prime when he 
came to Leicester Fields, while Hogarth was 
an old and broken man, whose greatest work 
was done. Apart from this, there could never 
have been much real sympathy between them. 



304 Miscellanies. 

Hogarth, whose own efforts as a portrait-painter 
were little appreciated in his lifetime, must have 
chafed at the carriages which blocked up the 
doorway of his more fortunate brother ; while 
Reynolds, courtly and amiable as he was, cap- 
able of indulgence even to such a caricaturist as 
Bunbury, could find for his illustrious neighbour, 
when he came to deliver his famous Fourteenth 
Discourse, no warmer praise than that of " suc- 
cessful attention to the ridicule of life." These 
things, alas I are scarcely novelties in literature 
and art. It is pleasanter to think of No. 47 
filled with those well-known figures of whom 
we read in Boswell and Madame D'Arblay ; — 
with Burke and Johnson and Goldsmith and 
Gibbon and Garrick ; — with graceful Angelica, 
and majestic Siddons, and azure-stockinged 
Montagu ; — with pretty Nelly O'Brien and 
charming Fanny Abington ; — with all the 
crowd of distinguished soldiers, sailors, lawyers, 
and literati who by turns filled the sitters' chair ^ 
in the octagonal painting-room, or were ushered 
out and in by the silver-laced footmen. Then 
there were those wonderful disorderly dinners, 

1 This, with the carved easel given to him by Gray's 
friend Mason, is preserved at the Royal Academy. His 
palette is said to be in the possession of Messrs. Roberson 
and Co., of 99, Long Acre. 



At Leicester Fields. 305 

where the guests were so good and the feast so 
indifferent ; where there were always wit and 
learning, and seldom enough of knives and forks ; 
where it was an honour to have talked and lis- 
tened, and no one remembered to have dined. 
Last comes that pathetic picture of Sir Joshua, 
when his sight had failed him, wandering sadly 
in the inclosure with his green shade over his 
eyes, and peering wistfully and vainly for the 
lost canary which had been wont to perch upon 
his finger. 

When Reynolds died, Burke wrote his eulogy 
in the very house where his body lay. The 
manuscript (which still exists) was blotted with 
its writer's tears. Those royal periods in which 
the great orator spoke of his lost friend are 
too familiar to quote. But after Sir Joshua, 
the interest seems to fade out of the Fields, 
and one willingly draws one's pen through the 
few remaining names that are written in its 
chronicles. 



MARTEILHE'S "MEMOIRS." 

The Adventures of a Book. 

THE threadbare dictum of Terentianus Mau- 
rus touching books and their destinies, was 
never more exactly verified than by the story of 
the record which gives its title to the present 
paper. In the year 1757 was issued at Rotter- 
dam, by J. and D. Beman and Son 'of that 
Batavian city, a little thick octavo of 552 pages, 
on poor paper with worse type, of which the 
following is the textual title : — ** Mimoires d'un 
Protestant, Condamn^ aux GaUres de France 
pour Cause de Religion ; Merits par lui m^me : 
Ouvrage, dans lequel, outre le rdcit, des souffrances 
de VAuteur depuis I'joo jusqu'en lyij ; on trou- 
per a diperses Particularitds curieuses, relatives 
d rHistoire de ce Temps-Id, &* une Description 
exacte des GaUres 6^ de leur Serviced In 1774 
a second edition of the book was published at 
the Hague, to be followed four years later by a 
third. In the Rotterdam impression the names 
of some of the personages and localities had been 
simply indicated by initials; in the third issue 
of 1778 — the author having died not many 



Marteilhe's *' Memoirs.'' 307 

months before — these particulars were inserted 
at full. It then appeared that the " Memoirs" 
— concerning the authenticity of which, from 
internal evidence, there could never have been 
any reasonable doubt — were those of a certain 
Jean Marteilhe of Bergerac on the Dordogne, 
in the Province of P6rigord in France, and that 
they had been edited and prepared for the press 
from Marteilhe's own manuscripts by M. Daniel 
de Superville — probably the second of that 
name, since Daniel de Superville, the elder, a 
notable personage among the leaders of the 
Reformed Church, had long been dead when 
the work appeared in its first form. 

Circulating chiefly among the members of a 
proscribed community, and published in a for- 
eign country, these remarkable autobiographical 
experiences, notwithstanding their three edi- 
tions, had been practically lost sight of in France 
until some thirty years ago ; and the account of 
their revival — as partly recorded in a lengthy 
note to the excellent " Forgats pour la Foi " of 
M. A. Coquerel Fils — is sufficiently curious. 
About 1865, according to M. Coquerel, copies 
of the volume were so rare as to be practically 
unobtainable. There was none in the Biblio- 
theque Nationale of France ; and the only ex- 
ample known in Paris belonged to a Protestant 



3o8 Miscellanies. 

banker, M. Felix Vernes, by whom it had been 
lent occasionally to historical students and con- 
noisseurs. At Amsterdam there was a second 
copy in the library of M. Van Woortz, and it was 
believed that other copies existed in Holland. 
There was also, or at all events there is now, a 
copy at the British Museum. Meanwhile, the 
book had greatly impressed the fortunate few 
into whose hands it had come. Michelet, who 
makes mention of it both in his " Louis XIV. et 
le Due de Bourgogne,'' and his '^ Louis XIV. et 
la Rdpocation,'' spoke of it in terms of the high- 
est enthusiasm. It was written, he said, " comme 
entre terre et cieW Why was it not reprinted ? 
he asked. The reply lay no doubt in the diffi- 
culty of procuring a copy to print from ; and its 
eventual reproduction was the result of an acci- 
dent. In a catalogue of German books, M. 
Francois Vidal, pastor of the Reformed Church 
at Bergerac, came upon the title of a work pur- 
porting to relate the history of a fugitive Cami- 
sard. Himself a native of the Cevennes, and 
therefore specially interested in the subject, he 
sent for the volume, only to discover that, in- 
stead of relating to the " fanatics of Languedoc " 
(as Gibbon calls them), it was really an account 
of a Perigourdin Protestant who, after the Revo- 
cation, more than a century and a half earlier. 



Marteilhe's '' Memoirs.''' 309 

of the Edict of Nantes, had fled from that very 
Bergerac in which he (M. Vidal) was then 
exercising his calling. He had seen some ex- 
tracts from M. Vernes' copy of Marteilhe's 
'^ Memoirs," as those extracts had been made 
public in the Journal of an Historical Society 
(the Bulletin de la Soci6U de VHistoire du Protes- 
tantisme frangais), and he felt convinced that, 
notwithstanding certain (to him) transparent dis- 
guises of personages and localities, he was read- 
ing, in German, the story of Jean Marteilhe. 
He accordingly wrote, through the publisher 
of the German book, to its author, who proved 
to be the copious Dr. Christian Gottlob Barth, 
the founder of the Calwer Verlags-Verein in 
Wurtemburg, and a well-known writer on theo- 
logical subjects. Dr. Barth informed M. Vidal 
that the material for the adventures of his sup- 
posititious Camisard, whom he had christened 
Mantal, had been derived from F. E. Ram- 
bach's ^^Schicksal der Protestanten in Frank- 
reich,'' a work published at Halle in 1760, and 
alleged to be no longer procurable. Thereupon 
M. Vidal set about reconstructing the history in 
the light of this discovery. He translated Barth's 
summary into French, restored to Marteilhe the 
name of which Barth, with nothing but initials 
in his source of information, had been ignorant, 



310 Miscellanies. 

and then (having by good luck chanced upon a 
copy of the Rotterdam edition at Le Fleix, not 
many miles from Bergerac), incorporated with 
his version some of the more striking passages 
of the original record. Why he did not at once 
substitute that original for the summary, is, in all 
probability, to be explained by difficulties in the 
way of obtaining prolonged access to the Le 
Fleix copy. But the revelation of Marteilhe to 
France, even in mangled form, was still to be 
deferred. A portion of M. VidaFs book had no 
sooner made its appearance in UEglise Rdformde, 
a journal issued at Ntmes, than that journal was 
suddenly suppressed. In 1863 he therefore 
printed on his own account what he had written, 
in the form of a small i2mo pamphlet. One 
result of this publication — to which he still 
somewhat unaccountably gave the title of ^^La 
Fulte du Camisard'' — was to stimulate search 
for further copies of the original " Memoirs," 
another of which was found soon after in La 
Vendee, and was acquired by the Bibliotheque 
Nationale. Finally, in 1865, the Socidtd des 
Ecoles du Dimanche printed the complete text 
from the copy of M. Vernes with four fancy 
illustrations by the marine artist, Morel-Fatio,^ 

1 M. Antoine Leon Morel-Fatio, whose illustrations 
are not reproduced in the English and American edi- 



Marteilhe's *^ Memoirs. 311 

and a Preface and Appendices by M. Henri 
Paumier. Of this, four thousand copies were 
sold between 186^ and 1881, in which latter year 
a new and revised edition, with a second Preface 
by M. Paumier, was put forth. In the interim, 
an English version was published under the 
auspices of the Religious Tract Society, which, 
in addition to a translator's Preface, gave some 
further particulars respecting Marteilhe himself, 
said to be derived from an article in the Quarterly 
Revievj for July, 1866, though they are there 
admittedly taken from M. Coquerel. To these 
again, some slight supplementary contributions 
were made by the French editor in his new and 
revised edition of 1881. The translation of the 
Religious Tract Society was also issued in New 
York in 1867 by Messrs. Leypoldt and Holt 
under the title of "The Huguenot Galley- 
Slave." 

From what has been stated, it will be seen 
that, previously to the issue by the Sociiti des 
Ecoles du Dimanche, no edition of the origi- 
nal '* Memoirs " had been published in France. 

tions, should have been well qualified for his task. He is 
described as the " Horace Vernet of the sea-piece," and 
was a worthy rival of Isabey and Gudin. He died of 
grief at the Louvre in 1871, when the Prussians entered 
Paris. 



312 Miscellanies 

But it will also be observed that, as early as 
1760, or only three years after their first appear- 
ance in the United Provinces of the Nether- 
lands, those " Memoirs" had been incorporated 
in abridged form with Rambach's ^^ Schicksal 
der Protestanten in FrankreichS' What is per- 
haps even more remarkable is that — as M. 
Coquerel and the English translator of 1866 did 
not fail to point out — they had been translated 
earlier still in England, where, indeed, they 
appear to have attracted immediate attention in 
their first form, since the Monthly Review for 
May, 17^7, includes them in its " Catalogue of 
Foreign Publications." They must have been 
" Englished " shortly afterwards, for, in Febru* 
ary, 1758, Ralph Griffiths of the " Dunciad " in 
Paternoster Row, the proprietor of the Monthly- 
Review, and Edward Dilly of the " Rose and 
Crown" in the Poultry, issued conjointly, in two 
volumes i2mo, a version entitled '• The Memoirs 
of a Protestant, Condemned to the Galleys of 
France, for His Religion. Written by Himself." 
To this followed upon the title-page a lengthy 
description of the contents, differing from that 
of the French original, in so far as it laid stress 
upon the fact that the " Protestant" was "at 
last set free, at the Intercession of the Court of 
Great Britain " ; — and the work was further 



Marteilhe's ^'Memoirs.'' 313 

stated to be ''Translated from the Original, 
just published at the Hague [Rotterdam?], 
by James Willington." For this enigmatical 
"James Willington," whose name as an author 
is otherwise entirely unknown to fame, it has 
long been the custom to read ^' Oliver Gold- 
smith." Goldsmith, in fact, was actually en- 
gaged as a writer of all work upon the Monthly 
Review when the Rotterdam edition was an- 
nounced among its foreign books. To the 
same May number in which that announcement 
appeared, he supplied notices of Home's 
" Douglas," of Burke " On the Sublime and 
Beautiful," and of the new four-volume issue of 
Colman and Thornton's Connoisseur. He con- 
tinued to work for Griffiths' magazine until the 
September following, when, for reasons not now 
discoverable with certainty, he ceased his con- 
tributions to its pages. 

What appears to be the earliest ascription to 
his pen of the English version of the ' ' Memoirs " 
of Marteilhe is to be found in the life prefixed 
by Isaac Reed to the *' Poems of Goldsmith 
and Parnell/' 1795 • Here he is stated to have 
received twenty guineas for the work from Mr. 
Edward Dilly. The next mention of it occurs 
in the biographical sketch by Dr. John Aikin 
in the " Goldsmith's Poetical Works" of 1805. 



314 Miscellanies. 

Dr. Aikin says (p. xvi.) that Goldsmith sold the 
book to Dilly for twenty guineas. Prior (" Life 
of Goldsmith," 1837, i. 2^2) confirms this, upon 
the authority of Reed ; and he further alleges, 
though without giving his authority, that Griffiths 
'^acknowledged it [the translation] to be by 
Goldsmith." Forster follows suit (1848, p. 107 ; 
and 1877, i. 129) by stating that " the property 
of the book belonged to Griffiths," and that 
" the position of the translator appears in the 
subsequent assignment of the manuscript by the 
Paternoster Row bookseller to bookseller Dilly 
of the Poultry, at no small profit to Griffiths, for 
the sum of twenty guineas." Reed, it will be 
observed, says that Goldsmith received the 
twenty guineas ; Aikin, that Goldsmith sold the 
book ; Prior, as usual, writes so loosely as to 
be ambiguous, and Forster, although, in his last 
edition, he cites Reed and Aikin as his authori- 
ties, affirms that Griffiths sold it to Dilly. None 
of these statements would seem to be exactly 
accurate. The translation of the " Memoirs of 
a Protestant " was in reality sold by the author 
— much as, some years since, it was ascertained 
that the *' Vicar of Wakefield " was sold ^ — in 
three separate shares. By the kindness of the 

1 See the Preface to the/acstmile Reproduction of the 
First Edition, Elliot Stock, 1885. 



Marteilhe's ^^ Memoirs.'' 315 

late Mr. Edward Ford of Enfield, a devoted 
student of Goldsmith, the present writer was 
favoured with a transcript of Goldsmith's receipt 
for one of these shares from the hitherto unpub- 
lished original in Mr. Ford's possession.^ It 
runs as follows : — 

London, Jany ii^^, 1758 
Rec'd of M' Edward Dilly six pounds thirteen shillings 
and four pence, in full for his third share of my transla- 
tion of a Book entitled Memoirs of a Protestant condemned 
to the Gallies for Religion, Sec. 

Oliver Goldsmith. 
jC6i3s.4d. 

From this document — the signature only of 
which is in the handwriting of the poet — two 
things are clear, — first, that Goldsmith himself 
sold the book to Dilly and two others, one being 
Griffiths, whose name is on the title-page ; and, 
secondly, that the translation was by Goldsmith 
and not by James Willington. 

But why, it may be asked, was the name of 
Willington (an old Trinity College acquaintance 
of Goldsmith) put forward in this connection > 
The question is one to which it is not easy to give 
an entirely satisfactory answer. Mr. Forster, 

^ This interesting relic now [1898] belongs to his son 
and successor, Mr. J. W. Ford, of Enfield Old Park. 



3i6 Miscellanies. 

it is true, does not feel any difficulty in replying. 
" At this point," he says, " there is very mani- 
fest evidence of despair." But it is a character- 
istic of Mr. Forster's sympathetic and admira- 
ble biography that it occasionally appears to be 
written under the influence of preconceptions, 
and the evidence he mentions, however manifest, 
is certainly not produced. Mr. Forster fills the 
gap with eloquent disquisition on the obstacles 
in the path of genius, and so conducts his hero 
back to Dr. Milner's door at Peckham.^ How 
Goldsmith subsisted in the interval between his 
ceasing to write regularly for the Monthly Review 
and his return to his old work as an usher, is no 
doubt obscure. But it is probable that there 
was little variation in his manner of living, 
although his labours were not performed under 
surveillance in the Back Parlour of the " Dun- 
ciad." It has been discovered that about this 
time he was contributing portions of a " History 

1 " Time's devouring hand," it may be noted here (for 
the Chronicler of the fugitive must make his record where 
he can), has now removed all trace of Dr. John Milner's 
Peckham Academy, which stood in Goldsmith Road 
(formerly Park Lane), opposite the southern end of 
Lower Park Road. " Goldsmith House," as it was called 
latterly, was pulled down in 1891. A sketch of it appeared 
in the Daily Graphic for 24th February in that year. 



MarteilMs '' Memoirs.'" 317 

of Our Own Times " to the Literary Maga:{ine ; 
and it is also conjectured that these were not 
his sole contributions to that and other peri- 
odicals. Moreover, the version of Marteilhe's 
*' Memoirs" must have been made in the last 
months of 17^7, since the above receipt is dated 
January 11, 17^8, and the book was published 
in the following February. In addition to this, 
he was again, by his own account, attending 
patients as a doctor. '' By a very little practice 
as a physician, and a very little reputation as a 
poet" — he tells his brother-in-law, Hodson, in 
December, 17^7, " I make a shift to live." 
He was in debt, no doubt ; but he had already, 
says the same communication, " discharged his 
most threatening and pressing demands." Upon 
the whole, — Mr. Forster's " very manifest evi- 
dence " not being forthcoming, — it must be 
concluded that Goldsmith's position after ceas- 
ing to write for the Monthly Review (though not 
for Griffiths) was much what it had been before 
that event, perhaps even better, because he was 
more free ; and this being so, we are driven to 
the commonplace solution that, even in his Salis- 
bury Square garret, he was too conscious of 
those higher things within him to care to iden- 
tify himself with a mere imitation *' out of the 
French," executed for bread,- and not for repu- 



3i8 Miscellanies. 

tation ; and that he put Willington's name to the 
book in default of a better. He gave evidence 
of his genius in his most careless private letter ; 
he could not help it ; but the man who subse- 
quently refrained from signing the '' Citizen of 
the World," may be excused from signing the 
translated " Memoirs of a Protestant." 

That the translation produced under these 
conditions might have been better if the trans- 
lator had taken more pains, is but to turn Gold- 
smith's bon mot against himself. " Verbiim 
verho reddere " was scarcely his ambition, and 
those who wish for plain-sailing fidelity will do 
well, if they cannot compass the French original, 
to consult the rendering prepared for the Re- 
ligious Tract Society.^ The chief merits of the 
version of 1758 are first, that it is a con- 
temporary version, demonstrably from Gold- 
smith's pen ; and secondly, that it is Goldsmith's 
earliest appearance in book-form. It is not 
only characterised by its writer's unique and 
peculiar charm, but it is as delightful to read as 
any of his acknowledged journey-work. Even 
Griffiths of the " Dunciad," who reviewed it 
himself in the Monthly Review for May, 1758, 

1 This rendering, however, is incomplete, inasmuch as 
it omits the " Description of the Galleys," etc., about 
ninety of the final pages of the original. 



Marteilhe's '^Memoirs.'' 319 

cannot deny its merits in this respect. Speaking 
of the "ingenious Translator," he remarks that 
he " really deserves this epithet, on account of 
the spirit of the performance, tho','' he adds, 
grudgingly, *' we have little to say in com- 
mendation of his accuracy. Upon this latter 
count, it may be observed that in one instance, 
at least, inaccuracy is excusable. In telling, 
early in the book, the story of the abjuration by 
Marteilhe's mother of her Huguenot faith, Gold- 
smith makes her add to her declaration that she 
was " compelled by Fear." This is manifestly 
inexact, seeing that the French original runs : 
'^ Elle ajouta ces mots : la Force me le fait faire, 
faisantsans doute allusion au nom du Due " (i. e. 
the Duke de la Force). All this, as we know, 
must have been Greek to Goldsmith, because 
the names in the editio princeps of 17^7, from 
which he was working, were not given at full. 
But it must certainly be admitted that he deals 
freely with his text, occasionally suppressing 
altogether what he regards as redundant, and now 
and then inserting supplementary touches of his 
own. Speaking of the soup prepared in the 
gaol at Lille he says : " Even Lacedcemonian 
black Broth could not be more nauseous." 
There is nothing in the text of this classic die- 
tary, and what is more, Marteilhe would scarcely 



320 Miscellanies. 

have used the simile. Elsewhere the decoration 
is in what Matthew Arnold used to call the 
" Rule Britannia" vein. Of the valiant captain 
of the Nightingale who held his own so long 
against the galleys in that memorable engagement 
which plays such a moving part in Marteilhe's 
record, the writer says : *' Ce capitaine, qui 
n' avail plus rien d faire pour mettre sa flotte en 
sdreU, rendu son dpie,'' This Goldsmith trans- 
lates : '* At last the captain gave up his Sword 
without further Parley, like a true Englishman, 
despising Ceremony, when Ceremony could be 
no longer useful." 

Dealing in this place rather with the story 
of the book than its contents, it would be beyond 
the purpose of our paper to linger longer upon 
the extraordinary interest and simple candour of 
Marteilhe's narrative. But the mention just 
made of the captain of the Nightingale reminds 
us that some further particulars respecting this 
obscure naval hero were not long since brought 
to light by Professor J. K. Laughton.^ His 
name (which Marteilhe had forgotten) was Seth 
Jermy, and he had served as a lieutenant at the 
battle of Barfleur. He became captain of the 
Spy brigantine in January, 1697, and five years 
later was appointed to the command of the 

1 English Historical Review, January, 1889, pp. 65-80. 



Marteilhe's *^ Memoirs.'' 321 

Nightingale, a small 24-gun frigate, chiefly em- 
ployed in convoying corn-ships and colliers 
between the Forth, the Tyne, the Humber, and 
the Thames. In this duty he was engaged up 
to the fight with the French galleys, which took 
place, not, as Marteilhe says, in 1708, but in 
1707. In August, 1708, Captain Jermy re- 
turned from France on parole and was tried by 
court-martial for the loss of his ship. The fol- 
lowing are the minutes of the trial from docu- 
ments in the Public Record Office : — 

''At a court-martial held on board her Maj- 
esty's ship the Royal Anne at Spithead, on 
Thursday, 23 Sep. 1708; Present: The Hon. 
Sir George Byng, Knight, Admiral of the Blue 
Squadron of her Majesty's fleet. . . . 

*' Enquiry was made by the Court into the 
occasion of the loss of her Majesty's ship the 
Nightingale, of which Captain Seth Jermy was 
late commander, which was taken by six sail 
of the enemy's galleys off Harwich on 24 Aug. 
1707. The court having strictly examined into 
the matter, it appeared by evidence upon oath 
that the Nightingale was for a considerable time 
engaged with a much superior force of the 
enemy, and did make so good a defence as 
thereby to give an opportunity to all the ships 
under his convoy to make their escape ; and it 



322 Miscellanies. 

is the opinion of the court that he has not been 
anyway wanting in his duty on that occasion ; 
and therefore the Court does acquit the said 
Captain Jermy and the other officers as to the 
loss of Her Majesty's said ship Nightingale.'" 

Beyond the fact that he was exchanged against 
a French prisoner a little later, served again, 
was superannuated, and died in 1724, nothing 
further seems to be known of Captain Jermy. 
But of the captain who succeeded him on the 
Nightingale when that ship passed by capture 
into French hands — the infamous renegade 
whom Marteilhe calls " Smith, — " Pro- 
fessor Laughton supplies data which, since they 
are included only in one very limited edition of 
the "■ Memoirs," may here be briefly set down. 
After chequered experiences in the service 
of her Majesty Queen Anne, including a court- 
martial for irregularities while commanding the 
Bonetta sloop, Thomas Smith, being then, ac- 
cording to his own account, a prisoner at Dun- 
kirk, yielded to solicitations made to him, and 
entered the service of the King of France. In 
November, 1707, he was made commander of 
the captured Nightingale. In the December 
following, being in company with another Dun- 
kirk privateer, the Squirrel, he was chased and 
taken by the English man-of-war Ludlow Castle, 



Marteilhe's ^^ Memoirs.'' 323 

Captain Haddock. Smith was brought to Lon- 
don, tried for high treason at the Old Bailey 
(2nd June, 1708), and found guilty. "On 
18*!" June he was put on a hurdle and conveyed 
to the place of execution. . . . Being dead he 
was cut down, his body opened and his heart 
shown to the people, and afterwards burnt with 
his bowels, and his body quartered." And thus 
Marteilhe, when he came to London in 171 3 to 
thank Queen Anne for her part in his release, 
may well, as he avers, have seen Smith's mangled 
remains '* exposed on Gibbets along the Banks 
of the Thames.'' 

Marteilhe's story, it may be gathered, differs 
in some respects from the official account dis- 
interred from the Public Records. But the 
discrepancies are readily explained by the fact 
that much which he related must have been 
acquired at second hand. Speaking from his 
personal experience, he is accurate enough. 
What is known of him and his book, beyond 
the date at which it closes, needs but few words. 
"The author [of the ' Memoirs']," says Gold- 
smith in his Preface of 1757, "is still alive, and 
known to numbers, not only in Holland but 
London;" and it is quite possible that in one 
or other of these places, Goldsmith himself may 
have seen and conversed with him. An Aver- 



3 24 Miscellanies. 

tissement des Libraires prefixed to the Rotterdam 
edition, but not reproduced by Goldsmith or 
M. Paumier, is equally confirmatory of the 
authenticity of the book: ''Des Personnes de 
caract^re, 6- dignes de toute cr^ance, nous ont 
assures, que cet Ouvrage d, ete vdritablement com- 
post par un de ces Protestans, condamnis aux 
GaUres de France pour cause de Religion, 6^ qui 
enfurent delivris par r intercession de la Reine 
Anne d'Angleterre peu aprds la paix d' Utrecht. 
Les m^mes Personnes nous ont dit, qu'elles ont eu 
des liaisons personnelles avec VAuteur ; qu'elles ne 
doutent pas de sa bonne foi 6^ de sa probitd ; 6- 
quelles sont persuad6es, qu'autant que sa mdmoire 
a pu lui rappeller les fails, ceite Relation est ex- 
acte.'' Opposite the word '' creance,'' in the 
British Museum copy, is written in an old hand, 
" Mrs. Dumont & De Superville." As Daniel 
de Superville Senior was dead in 1757, the De 
Superville here mentioned was no doubt his son 
of the same Christian name, — a doctor, who, 
as above suggested, was probably the editor of 
Marteilhe's manuscripts. After this come nat- 
urally the details given, from Coquerel and else- 
where, in M. Paumier's second Preface, and 
already referred to. Marteilhe, we learn, did 
not reside permanently in the Netherlands — 
*' that Land of Liberty and Happiness," as 



Marteilhe's * ' Memoirs. " 325 

Goldsmith renders" Ces heureuses Provinces'' 
— but for some time was in business in London. 
He died at Cuylenberg, in Guelderland, on the 
4th November, 1777, at the age of ninety-three. 
Little is known about his family ; but it is 
believed that he had a daughter who was mar- 
ried at Amsterdam to an English naval officer 
of distinction, Vice-Admiral Douglas. 



GENERAL INDEX. 



GENERAL INDEX. 



A. 

Abbaye, the Prison of the, 40. 
Abbey, Edwin A., 166. 
Abe], 41, 42. 
Abington, Mrs. Fanny, 104, 

304- 

Absolon, 177. 

Achilles^ Gay's, 270. 

Ackermann, 174. 

Adam and Eve Gallery, the, 
192. 

Adams, Parson, 79. 

Addington ministry, the, 149. 

Addison, Joseph, Goldsmith's 
admiration for and imitation 
of, 12, 15 ; Letter from Italy 
to Lord Halifax, 15 ; 57, 58, 
60, 61, 76, 'j']^ 81, 82, 84, 158, 
245 ; Cato, 256 ; 286. 

Addison^ Life of Miss Aiken's, 
57. 

Admiralty buildings, the new, 

234- 
Agas, Ralph, 221, 222. 231, 

277. 
Agzieckeek, Sir Andrew^ Dodd 

as, 105. 
Aiken, Miss, Life of Addison^ 

57- 
Aikin, Dr. John, 313, 314. 



Aitken, George A., Life of 
Richard Steele^ 57-^6 ; 239. 

Aix, 259, 260. 

Albano, 154. 

Albany, the, 53. 

Albemarle, Duke of, 186, 1S7. 

Albemarle Street, 54. 

Albinus, 91. 

Alembert, D', 55. 

Alexander Le Imaginator, 223. 

Alhambra, the, 275, 276. 

Alhambra Company, the, 302, 

Alkrington, 293. 

Allen's, of Prior Park, 102, 10;. 

Alhvorthy^ Fielding's, 102. 

" Almack's," 205, 210, 212. 

Almanac Gencalogique^ the, 
179. 

Alvanley, Lord, 204. 

Amelia^ Fielding's, 115. 

America, 7. 

Amesbury, 37, 38, 268, 269. 

Amiens, the Peace of, 149. 

Amorevoli, 2S9. 

Amsterdam, 308, 325. 

Anacreon, 157. 

Afzalysis of the Gaelic Lan- 
guage, an, I 14. 

Anatomy of the Horse, Stubbs', 
42. 

Anderson, Alexander, 173. 



330 



General Index. 



Anderson, Mr. John P., 138. 
Andromagtie, Duchesnois in, 

157. 
Anecdotes of the late Samuel 

Johnson, LL. Z>., 115. 
Anelay, 177. 
Angelica, 304. 

Angelique, Mile. Mars as, 159. 
Angelo, Dominico, episode 

with Mrs. Woffington, 33, 34; 

a " master of equitation," 34; 

his school in Soho, 35 ; his 

marriage, 35, 36; his son, 36; 

visits to Eton, 37; 41, 42; 

his visitors, 41-43; 45; death 

of, 46; his Ecole des Ar7}tes, 

55- 
Angelo, Henry, Retniniscences 
of, 33-56; his birth, 36; in 
tke Navy, 36; at Eton, 36; a 
visit to Amesbury, 37; in 
Paris, 38, 39; an expert 
swordsman, 39, 46 ; returns 
to London, 40 ; his visitors, 
41-43 ; early expei-iences of, 
44-46; intimacy with Row- 
landson, 47-48; other asso- 
ciates, 49 ; an excellent 
amateur actor, 49; his dra- 
matic essays, 50; the " Pic- 
Nic Society," 51; anecdotes, 
52 J Byron his pupil, 53 ; his 
"graceful ease" in eluding 
dates, 54 ; My Own Boast- 
ings, 54; Angelo'' s Ptc-Nic, 

55- 
Angelo's, 107. 
Angela^ s Pic-Nic, 55, 
Animated Nature, 249. 
Anne, Queen, ']o, 79, 186, 237; 



History of the Reign of, 241 j 

254, 2S1, 286, 322, 323, 324. 
Anspach, the Margravine of, 51. 
Anstey, Christopher, 19. 
Appius and Virginia, 248. 
Apollo Belvedere, the, 153. 
Apology for Hi77iself and his 

Writings, Steele's, 79. 
Arabian Nights, Foi-ster's, 

148. 
Arachne, the Story of, 247. 
Arajninta, Gay's, 250. 
Arber, Mr., 245. 
Arblay, Madame D', 134, 148, 

296, 304. 
Arbuthnot, 252, 254, 255, 259, 

262, 267, 268, 270. 
Archer, Lady, 51. 
Argus, the, 160. 
Argyll tomb, the, 38. 
Aristotle, 254. 
Arlington, Lord, 196. 
Arnold, Matthew, 320. 
Assassination Plot, the, 63. 
Astley,35. 
As to my Herjjtit, Goldsmith's, 

17, 26, 37. 
Athenceuin, the, 256. 
Athenaeum Club, the, no. 
Augusta, Anna, 249. 
Augusta, Princess, 290. 
Austen, Jane, 56, 108. 
Australia, 134. 
Axminster, 256. 
Aylesbury family, the, 291. 

B. 

Bach, John Christian, 41. 
Bach, John Sebastian, 41. 



General Index. 



331 



"Bach Mews," 231. 

Bagshot Heath, 256. 

Bajazet^ 157. 

Baker, George, the print-col- 
lector, 147. 

Baldwin, 119. 

Ballad on a Weddings Suck- 
ling's, 229. 

Bailer, Rev. Joseph, 241, 242. 

Bailer, Mrs., 270. 

Balliol, the Master of, Z^. 

Bank of England, the, 268. 

Bannister, John, 49, 

Bannister'' s Budget, 49. 

Banqiieting-House, the old, 183, 
184, 185, 186, 18S, 189, 193, 
196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 
202. 

Barbados, 69, "jo, 74, 75. 

Bar bier, the, 158. 

Baretti, 135. 

Barillon, 156. 

Barnaby Rtcdge, Dickens's, 291. 

Barnard, Frederick, 166. 

Barnes, Joshua, 286. 

Barnes Terrace, 157. 

Barnstaple, 239, 240, 249. 

Barons, T58. 

Barrington, George, the pick- 
pocket, 95. 

Barry, 296. 

Barrymore, the Earl of, 50. 

Barth, Dr» Christian Gottlob, 

309- 
Bartholo, Desessarts as, 158. 
Bartolozzi, the engraver, 42, 

46. 
Barton, Catherine, 297, 298. 
Basire, 169. 
Bastille, the, 151. 



Bate, Parson, The Blackamoor 

was/I'd white, 44. 
Batelier, 279. 

Bath, 55, 72, 90, 204, 268. 
Bathos, the, 301. 
Battle of La Hague, 296. 
BatUe of the Boyne, West's, 42. 
Baxter, Mr. Timothy, 168. 
Bear Street, 294. 
Beaufort Buildings, 47. 
Beaumarchais, 109. 
Beaupre, 158. 

Beau-Tibbs-above-Stairs, 25. 
Beauties of English Poesy, 

Goldsmith's, 15, 20. 
Beau.x'' Stratagem, the, 22, 104. 
Becky Sharp, 44. 
Bedford, the Duke of, 92. 
Bee, The, periodical started by 

Goldsmith (1759), 22,26. 
Beer Buttery, the, 195. 
Beggar'' s Opera, Gay's, 264-26S, 

272. 
Bell, Messrs. George, and Sons, 

132, 
Bellenden, Mary, 287, 2S8. 
Beman and Son, Messrs., 306. 
Beranger, 150. 
Bergerac, 307, 30S, 309, 310. 
Berkeley, Lord, 51, 82, 83, 236, 

286. 
Berkeley letters, the, "]"]. 
Berkely, Lady, 285. 
Berlin, 178. 

"Bermudas," the, 232, 233. 
Betterton, 54. 
Bewick, Thomas, the engraver^ 

105, 172, 173. 
Bibliotheque Nationale of 

France, the, 307, 310. 



332 



General Index. 



Bickers, the Messrs., 129. 

Bicker staff, Mr. Isaac, 246. 

Bicker staff ''s Lzicubrations, 245. 

Billingsgate, 133. 

Billy the Butcher, 43. 

Binns, Mrs,, 75. 

Biography of Charles /., Lilly's, 

224. 
Birth of the Squire, Gay's, 

273- 
Blackamoor -washed White, the, 

44. 
Blackberry, 173. 
Black-eyd Susan, Gay's, 260, 

Blackfriars Bridge, 294. 

Blackmore, 64. 

Black Spread-Eagle, the, 243. 

Blake, 91. 

Blake, William, the engraver, 
169, 265. 

Blenheim, 285. 

Blenheim MSS., the, 62, 76. 

Blessington, Lady, 206. 

Blind Mail's Buff, Kaimbach's, 
144. 

Bloomsbury, 83, 231. 

Blount, Mountjoy, Earl of New- 
port, 278. 

" Blue-skin," see Blake, 91. 

Boarded Gallery, the, T92. 

Board of Trade, the, 195. 

Boerhaave, 91. 

Boileau, M., description of, 38. 

Boileau, Nicholas, 17, 65. 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 141, 252, 
254. 

Bolton, Duchess of, 285. 

Bonaparte, 151, 152, 155, 160. 

Bond Street, 54. 



Bonetta, the, sloop, 322. 

Boothby, Miss Hill, 133. 

Boswell, James, 44, no, 112, 
114; Journal of a Tour to 
the Hebrides, 114, 118; 115, 
116, 117, 118, 119; Life of 
Johnson, 120-134 ; death of, 
123; 135, 136, 137; Jourtial 
of a Tour to Corsica, 139 ; 

304- 
Boswelliana, 131, 137. 
Boswells, the, 95. 
BoswelPs Predecessors and 

Editors, 96, 109-143. 
Boucher, 154. 
Boulogne, 204. 
Bourgueleret, 180. 
Bourne, Vincent, 135. 
Bowling Green, the, 190, 197, 

201. 
Boyle, 229. 

Bradshaw, Mrs., 108, 262. 
Brandenburgh House, 51. 
Brasenose College, 123. 
Brass, 50. 

Brick Court, No. 2, 31. 
Brighton, 50, 149, 210. 
British Museum, the, 70, 76, 

231, 281, 308. 
British Museum Library, the, 

203. 
Brooks's, 204. 
Broome, 247. 
Broughton, 54. 
Brown, " Capability," 100. 
Brummell, 210. 
Brunswick, the, 48. 
Brunswick, Prince of, 290. 
Buchard, 295. 
Buckhorse, the boxer, 107, 



General Index. 



333 



Buckingham Court, 237. 
Buckingham, Duke of, 235, 

255,285. 
Buckingham, Duchess of, 287. 
Buckinghamshire, Lady, 51. 
Buckley, 76. 
Bull, Mr, Edward, 93. 
Bull Head Tavern, the, 237. 
Bunbury, 304. 
Burbage, Richard, the actor, 

145. 
Buro/ie/l, Mr., Goldsmith's, 

168, 170, 173, 176, 179,291. 
Burford's Panorama, 276. 
Buridan, 272. 
Burke, Edmund, 18, 19, 94, 95, 

100, 292, 299, 304, 305, 313. 
Burlington Gardens, 268. 
Burlington, Lord, 256, 259, 260, 

262, 295. 
Burnet, 144, 192 ; History of the 

Reformation, 193 ; 284. 
Burney, Dr. Charles, 296, 299. 
Burney, Edward, 148. 
Burney, Fanny, 299. 
Burnham Beeches^ 217. 
Burton, Dr. Hill, 241 ; History 

of the Reign of Queen Anne, 

241. 
Bury Street, "]■}>, 75- 
Butler, 108. 
Butler, James, 62. 
Byng, Sir George, 321. 
Byron, 53, 54, 98, 206, 215, 

273- 
Byron, Lady, 98. 

C. 

Caen, in Normandy, 222. 
Caennarthenj Marquis of, 291, 



C<ssar''s Commentaries, Clarke's, 

2S6. 
Cafe Jacob, the, 161. 
Calais, 163. 
Calais Gate, 301. 
Caldecott, Randolph, 182. 
Caiwer, Verlags-Verein, the, 

309- 
Cambridge, 53. 
Cambridge, Richard Owen, 96 ; 

the Scriblcriad, 97; 293. 
Cambridge the Everything, 

293- 
Camisard, 308, 309, 310. 
Campbell, Vitriivius Britanni- 

cus, 183. 
Campbell, Colonel John, 288. 
Campbell, Dr. Thomas, 134, 

i35> 136. 
Canaletto, 42, 230. 
Cannon Row, 237. 
Canons, 276, 295. 
Canterbury, the Archbishop of, 

36. 
Captives, the, Gay's, 263. 
Captivity, Goldsmith's, 18. 
Carew, 224. 

Carhampton, the Earl of, 219. 
Carleton House, 234. 
Carleion-s Memoirs, 63, 133. 
Cariisle House, 40, 43. 
Carlisle House Riding School, 

the, 42. 
Cariisle Street, 54, 107. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 124, 127, 129, 

139- 
Carmarthen, 79. 
Caroline, Princess, 296. 
Carracci, the, 154. 
Carrickfergus, 81, 



334 



General Index. 



Carrington, Lord, 195. 
Carruthers, Dr. Robert, 128, 

129, 
Carter, Mrs., 163. 
Case of Atithors by Profession^ 

Ralph's, 22. 
Castle, Mr. Egerton, 54. 
Castle Street, 303. 
Castlemaine, Lady, 1S8, 201. 
Catherine of Braganza, 192, 

199. 
Catholic Bill, the, 291. 
Cato^ Addison's, 256. 
Catton, Charles, 301. 
Catullus , 96. 
Cavallini, Pietro, 222. 
Cave, Edward, 240. 
Cecil Court, 145. 
Censoriuin, the. So. 
Centlivre, Mrs., 67, 237. 
Cevennes, 308. 
Chabannes, Jacques de. Seigneur 

de la Palice, hero of Pavia, 

14. 
Chalmers, Alexander, 76, 123. 
Chaloner, 223. 
Chamfort, 206. 
Champs-]^lys6es, the, 151. 
Chandos, the Duke of, 260. 
Chapeau de Brigand, Uwins's, 

172. 
Chapel, 74. 
Chapter of Accidents, Miss 

Lee's, 104. 
Charing Cross, 186, 188, 220, 

221, 224, 225, 229, 230, 231, 
233, 236, 277, 295. 

Charing Cross, the, 220, 22T, 

222, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 
234- 



Charing Cross Road, 303. 
Charles, 209; Smith as, 105, 
Charles I., 184, 186, 196, 220, 

224, 225, 226, 227, 234, 235, 

287, 295. 
Charles II., 187, 193, 194, 199, 

200, 225, 227, 279. 
Charles VI.. Emperor, 282. 
Charles X., 229. 
Charles, Earl of Halifax, 297. 
Charles Street, 148, 292. 
Charlotte, Princess of Wales, 

171. 
Charlotte, Queen, 99, 293. 
Charmouth, 257. 
Charterhouse, the, 60, 80. 
Chateaubriand, Cymodocee, 216. 
Chatham, Lord, 100, 106. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, T^y, 221. 
Chaumette, 157. 
Cheere, 295. 

Chelsea Hospital, the, 94. 
Cheltenham, 204. 
Cheselden, the anatomist, 8g. 
Chesterfield, Lord, 90, 106, 136, 

287. 
Chetwood, History of the Stage, 

57. 
Chichester, the King of, 193. 
Chiffinch, 192. 
Chiswick, 36, 262, 301. 
Chiswick Press, the, 124. 
Chocolate House, 74. 
Chodowiecki, Daniel, 178, 179. 
Christ Church, Oxford, 61. 
Christian Hero, the, 61, 65. 
Christie's, 142. 
Christmas, Gerard, 228. 
Chudleigh, Miss, 288. 
Churchill, Charles, the satire of, 



General Index. 



335 



12; 91; T/ie Ghost, 91; 99, 

106; the Rosciad, 106. 
Gibber, CoUey, 237, 265. 
Gibber, Theophilus, 79 ; Lives of 

the Poets, 133. 
Gipriani, 42, 46, 199. 
Citizen, Murphy's, 159. 
Citizen of the World, The, 

Goldsmith's, 26, 31S. 
City Shower, Swift's, 213, 242, 

257. 
Glairon, Mademoiselle, 22. 
Clandestine Marriage, Garrick 

and Golman's, 23. 
Glare, Lord, 18. 
Glarendon, the Earl of, 253. 
Glarendon Press, the, 138. 
Clarissa series, 169. 
Clarke, Samuel, 286. 
Clennell, Luke, 173. 
Gleveland, the Duchess of, 187, 

194. 
Glive, Mrs. Gatherine, loi, 103, 

104. 
Gliveden, 103, 290. 
"Glub, the," 117. 
Goan, the Norfolk dwarf, 106, 

107. 
Cock and Fox, Chaucer's, j'j. 
Gock Lane Ghost, 227, 229. 
Gockpit, the old, 74, 1S6, 197. 
Goffee House, 74. 
Gohen, 180. 
Golbert, Gharles, Marquis de 

Groissy, 200, 276, 279. 
Coldstream Guards, the, 62, 63. 
Cole, Mrs., 49. 
College of Physicians, 233. 
College of Surgeons, the, 303. 
Collier, 65 ; Short View of the 



Immorality and Profaneness 

of the English Stage, 66. 
Collins, B., 167. 
Colhns, Mortimer, 51. 
Golhns, William, Goldsmith's 

appreciation of the work of, 

12. 
Golman, 23, 28, 87 ; Iron Chest, 

146. 
Golman and Thornton, 313. 
Golnbrook, 50. 
Combe, 174. 
Comedie Lyrique, Poinsinet's, 

160. 
Commicnion of St. "Jerome, 

Domenichino's, 154. 
Coinpany of Undertakers, 8g. 
Comus, 50. 

Goncannon, Mrs., 51. 
Gonduitt, John, 298. 
Conduitt, Mrs., see Barton, 

Gatherine. 
Confectionary, the, 195. 
Confederacy, Vanbrugh's, 50. 
Gongreve, William, 22, 63, 257, 

266, 289. 
Connoisseur, Colman and 

Thornton's, 313. 
Conscious Lovers, Steele's, 79. 
Constable, 144. 

Constant Couple, Farquhar's, 57. 
Co7isziltation of Physicians, 89. 
Gontarine, Jane, Goldsmith's 

verses for, 10. 
Contemplation tip on Death, 

Gay's, 250. 
Cook, 293. 

Cook, a criminal, 225. 
Cook, Henry, the painter, 40. 
Cook, William, iii, 112. 



33^ 



General Index. 



Cooke, Tales of the Genii, 148 ; 

170. 
Cooke, Captain Henry, 187. 
Cooper, 90. 

Copperfield, David, 165. 
Coquecigrues, 30. 
Coquerel, M. A., Fils, 307, 311, 

312, 324. 
Coram, Captain, 301, 
Corbould, George, 175. 
Corbould, R., 148, 170, 171, 175. 
Corfe, in Dorsetshire, 222. 
Cork, 7. 

Cornaro family, Titian's, 229. 
Cornelys, Mrs. Theresa, 40 ; 

her concerts, 41 ; 107. 
Cornhill^ the, 138. 
Coromandel, 10. 
Correggio, Marriage of St. 

Catherine, 154. 
Corsica, King of, 91. 
Costigans, the, 165. 
Council office, the, 189. 
Cousens, 144. 
Covent Garden, 23, 28, 45, 114, 

134, 221, 238, 301, 303. 
Coverlcy, Sir Roger de, 1S7. 
Cow Lane, 280. 
Cowper, William, 13 ; pioneer of 

the new school, 13 ; 84. 
Cozens, Alexander, 46. 
Crace collection, the, 281. 
Cradock, 17, 20. 
Craggs, 260. 

Craig, William Marshall, 171. 
Creed, Mr., 200. 
Ciemona, 283. 

" C'ribbee Islands," 232, 233. 
Cries of Lo7tdon, 52. 
Crisis, the, Steele's, yZ, 79. 



Critic, the, 97, 106. 

Croaker, Shuter as, 24 ; 25, 26. 

Croaker, Ally, 18, 19. 

Croaker, Mrs., 25. 

Crockford House, Luttrell's, 

204, 217. 
Crockford's, 204. 
Croissy, Marquis de, 200, 279. 
Croker, John Wilson, 109, 124, 

126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 

"^zi^ 139, 141, 143, 299. 

Cromwell, Henry, 246, 247, 256. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 199, 224,236. 
Cross, Mr., 232. 
Crosse, Mrs. Andrew, 219. 
Cross Readings, 96. 
Cruikshank, George, 55, 166, 

176, 182. 
Cruikshank, Robert, 88. 
Crundale, Richard de, 222. 
Cumberland, Duke of, 135, 197, 

289. 
Cumberland, Richard, West In^ 

dian, 27 ; 31, 96, 97, 126, 134. 
Cunningham, Peter, 198, 225, 

238, 278, 295. 
Curll, Edmund, 227. 
Cutts, Lord, 62, 63, 64. 
Cuylenberg, 325. 
Cytnodocee, Chateaubriand's, 

216. 
Czar, the, 291. 



D. 

Daily Graphic, the. 



;i6. 



D'Alembert, see Alembert, D '. 
Dalrymple, Sir David, 137. 
Danckers, 200. 

D'Arblay, Madame, see Arblay, 
Madame D ', 



General Index. 



337 



Das Kind der Liebe, Kotzebue, 

io8. 
David, Jacques Louis, 154; 

The Sabines, 154; 155. 
David, Madame, 155. 
Davies, Thomas, 114. 
Davy, Lady, 205. 
Dean and Murday, Messrs., 

171. 
Dean Street, 41. 
Death of General Wolfe ^ 296. 
Death on the Pale Horse^ 

West's, 155. 
Debates in Parliainents, John- 
son's, 143. 
Delaval, Lord, 40. 
Dennis, the critic, 81, 248, 259. 
D'Entraigues, see Entraigues, 

d'. 
D';^on, see Eon, D'. 
Deptford, 291. 
Derby, Lord, 104. 
Desborough, Captain, 282. 
Desdemona, 224. 
Deserted Village, Goldsmith's, 

9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27, 32. 
Desessarts, 158. 
Desforges, M., Tom Jojies tt 

Londres, 159. 
Desnoyers, the dancing master, 

288. 
Destouches, Nericault, La 

Pausse Agnls, 159. 
Devil Tavern, the, 244. 
Devone, Monsieur, 225. 
Devonshire, 142, 256. 
Devonshire, the Duke of, 35. 
Dial, the, 226. 
Diary of a Tour in Wales, X2.c), 

132. 



Dibdin, Charles, the song-writer, 

147, 295. 
Dick, 50. 

Dickens, Charles, 166, 291. 
" Dickey, little," Addison's, 15S. 
Dicky, 57. 
Diderot, 55. 
Dieppe, 149, 150. 
Dilly, Charles, 120. 
Dilly, Edward, 312, 313, 314, 

315- 

Dione^ 260. 

Distressed Mother, the, Kem- 
ble's, 159. 

Doble, 286. 

Dr. Johnson ; His Friends and 
His Critics, Hill's, 136, 138. 

Doctor Syntax, Combe's, 174. 

Dodd, the actor, 105. 

Dodd, Daniel, the miniaturist, 
167, 168, 

Dodd, Dr,, execution of, 45. 

Dodd's Chapel, Dr., 135. 

Dodington, Bubb, 288. 

Dodsley's Freedom and Sympa- 
thy, 16. 

Domenichino, Com7mmion of 
St. Jerome, 153. 

Dominicetti, the Italian quack, 

37- 
Donaldson, Mr,, 107. 
Don Quixote, Smirke's, 165 ; 

Tony Johannot's, 165 ; Gus- 

tave Dore's, 165. 
Dorchester, 257. 
Dorchester, Countess of, C87. 
Dordogne, 307. 
Dore, Gustave, 165. 
Dorset, 237. 
Dorset Place, 222, 233, 



22 



r.8 



General Index. 



Double Dealer^ the, loi. 

Dotible Transformation, The, 
Goldsmith's, 13 ; Prior the 
model for, 13. 

Douglas, Charles, 240. 

Douglas, Home's, 313. 

Douglas, Vice-Admiral, 325, 

Dover, 163. 

Dover, the Duke of, 240. 

Dragon, the, man-of-war, 36. 

Drake, "jG. 

Drayton, Michael, 278. 

Dress, Gay on, 250. 

Dromore, Bishop of, 229. 

Drtamner, the, Addison's, 58. 

Drummond's Bank, 237. 

Drury Lane, 23, 28, 42, 44, d'j. 

Drury Lane Theatre, 80, 97, 98, 
250, 255, 261. 

Dryden, John, Goldsmith's ad- 
miration for the work of, 12; 
Quack Maurus, 64; 142, 143. 

Dublin, 7, 9, 60, 270, 282. 

Dublin street-singers, Gold- 
smith's ballads for, 9. 

Duchesnois, Mile., 156, 158. 

Dugazon, 158. 

Duill, Mrs., 105. 

Du Maurier, 166. 

Dumont, Mrs., 324. 

Duncannon Street, 231. 

Dunciad, Grififith's, 312, 313, 
316, 31S. 

Dtmciad, Pope's, 109. 

Dunkirk, '^Z, 322. 

Duperrier, Francois, 194. 

Dupont, Gainsborough, 144. 

Dutch school, the, 153. 

Dyer, 117. 

Dyers, the, 80. i 



E. 

Eaton Square, 107. 

Eclogues, Gay's, 273. 

Ecole des Amies, the elder 
^Angelo's, 55. 

Ecoles de Notre Dame de 
France, 294. 

Edgeware, 295. 

Edgware, 27. 

Edinburgh, the, 57. 

Edward VI., 192. 

Edwin and Angelijta, Gold- 
smith's, 17. 

Egerton, T., 56. 

Eginton, 172. 

Egleton, Mrs., 265. 

Eglise Refortnee, V, 310. 

Egmont's MSS., Lord, •]>]. 

Eight eejith Centtiry Vignettes, 
Dobson's First Series, 269 ; 
Second Series, 233 ; Third 
Series, 237, 288, 293. 

Eleanor, Queen, 220, 221, 222. 

Election Entertaijiment, the, 
238. 

Election of Gotham, the, 67. 

Elegy, Gray's, 12 ; Goldsmith's 
criticism of, 12. 

Elegy on the Death of a Mad 
Dog, Goldsmith's, 14, 15, 181, 
182. 

Elizabeth of Bohemia, 279. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 150, 185, 221. 

Elliot's Light Horse, 34. 

Ellis, Dr. Welbore, 61. 

Elphinston, Mr., 114. 

Elwin, Mr., 250. 

Embankment, the, 191. 

Empire, the, 276. 



General Index. 



339 



Enfield Old Park, 315. 

England, 22, 178. 
English Garner, 245. 
Rjiglish Historical Review^ the, 

320. 
English Humourists, Thack- 
eray's, 239. 
English Illustrated Magazine, 

182. 
Englishman, the, "j?). 
Entraigues, Count d', 157. 
Entraigues, Countess d', 157. 
Epigrami7iatical Petition, 

Gay's, 253. 
Fpistle to a Lady, Gay's, 255. 
Epistle to Bernard Lintott, 

Gay's, 243, 247. 
Epistle to Churchill, Lloyd's, 

227. 
]fon, the Chevalier D', 41, 55, 

107. 
Erse Grammar, Shaw's, 114. 
Erskme, Andrew, 139. 
Escrime, 55. 
Escurial, the, 184. 
Essay on Criticism, 247. 
Essay on the Life, Character, 
and Writings of Dr. Satmtel 
Johnson, Towers', 118. 
Essex, 198. 

Essex, Countess of, 261. 
Eton, 36, 46, 107. 
Eugene, Prince, 276, 282, 283, 

284, 2S5, 286. 
European Magazine, the, iii, 

112. 
Evelina, 299. 

Evelyn, John, 186, 187, t88, 
189; his Diary, 190, 191, 
^92? i93> 194; 200, 202, 225, 



228, 229, 236, 279, 280, 281, 

291. 
Exeter, 256, 259, 260, 
Exeter Change, 232, 270. 

F, 

Fables, Gay's, 263, 273. 

Fagan, Mr. Louis, 295. 

Fair Penitent^ Rowe's, 102. 

Faithorne's map, 277. 

False Delicacy, Hugh Kelly's, 
24. 

Palstaff, Sir John, Stephen 
Kemble's, 105 ; Kenny Mea- 
dows', 165 ; Sir John Gil- 
bert's, 165 ; Edwin A. 
Abbey's, 166. 

Fan, the, Gay's, 250, 273. 

Farintosh, Lord, 50. 

Faroes Daughters, 51. 

Farquhar, Constant Couple, 57. 

Farquhars, the, 31. 

Farren, Miss, 104. 

Fauconberg, Lady, 289. 

Faulkland, 29. 

Faussans, the, 289. 

Fawcett, 88. 

Female Faction, the, 267. 

Female Phaeton, Prior's, 240. 

Fenton, 247, 261. 

Fenton, Lavinia, 265. 

Ferdinand, Prince of Bruns- 
wick, 290. 

Fielding, Henry, his burlesque 
of Richardson's Pamela, 20 ; 
foseph Andrews, 20, 16S, 169, 
251 ; Pasquin, 23 ; 30, 58, 71, 
80, 82, 89, 102, 115; Journal 
of a Voyage to Lisbon, 142 ,' 
273. 301- 



340 



General Index. 



Fife House, 195. 

Finden, William, the engraver, 

144, 175, 180. 
Fisher, Edward, the mezzo- 

tinter, 144, 300. 
Fisher, John, 185. 
Fisher's Flan, 185, 1S6, 190, 

1 96. 
Fish-Pool, the, 80. 
Fitzgerald, Mr, Percy, 129, 130, 

i3i> 138, 143- 

Fitzherbert, Mrs., 50. 

Five Fields, the, 107. 

Fives Court, the, 210. 

Flanders, 282. 

Flattery, Gay on, 250. 

Flaxman, 147, 149, 170. 

Flemish school, the, 153. 

Florence, 290. 

Plyi7ig-Post, the, 64. 

Fontenoy, the battle of, 2S9. 

Foote, Samuel, The Handsome 
Housemaid ; or^ Piety in Pat- 
tens, 29; 39, 40, 41; Taste, 
40, 50 ; Minor, 49; The Liar, 
49. 

Foppington, Lord, 162, 237. 

Formats pour la Foi, Coquerel's, 

307- 

Ford, Mr. Edward, 315, 

Ford, Mr. J. W., 315. 

Ford, Major, 69. 

Ford, Parson, 135. 

Ford, Sir Richard, 201. 

Foreign Offices, the, 183. 

Fores, of Piccadilly, 48. 

Forster, Biography of Gold- 
smith, 8 ; Arabian Nights, 
148: 314,315, 3t6, 317. 

"^ Forster Library," the, 241. 



Fortescue, 242. 

Fortescue, Mrs., 270. 

Forth, the, 321. 

Forton, 48. 

Foster, Sermons, 136. 

Foundling, the, 135. 

Fotir Stages of Cruelty, the, 

Plogarth's, 46. 
Fox, Charles, 95, 156; History 

of the Revolution of 1688, 

156. 
Fragonard, 154. 
France, iSo, 229. 
FrankHn, Benjamin, 290, 302. 
Frederick, Prince of Wales, 

276, 2S8, 290. 
Frederick the Great, 301. 
Frederika, 179. 
Freedom, Dodsley's, 16. 
Freeinasons' Tavern, the, 88. 
French Revolution, the, 147, 

149, 151. 
Frere, 273. 
Friar Pine, the, 30T. 
" Fubs," the Royal yacht, 282. 
Fuite dti Camisard, la, Vidal's, 

310. 
Funeral, the, Steele's, 57, 65. 
Fuseli, 99. 

G. 

Gainsborough, 42, 144. 

Gallas, Count, 286. 

Gamps, the, 165. 

Gardel, Mme., 158. 

Garrick, Carrington, 36. 

Garrick, David, 18, 23, 24, 28, 
31, 36, 40; his farewell to the 
stage, 45, 49 ; loi, 105, 107, 



General Index. 



341 



135 ; Ode on Mr. Pelham, 
141; 146, 302, 304. 

Garrick, Mrs., 37, 45. 

Garrick, Nathan, 36. 

Garrick and Colman's Clandes- 
tine Marriage, 23; Lord 
Oglehy, 23. 

Gascoigne, Henry, 60. 

Gatti, 88. 

Gautier, Theophile, 165. 

Gay, John, 12, 19, 38, 67, 156, 
232 ; Life of, 239 ; birth of, 
239 ; Poetical Works, 239 ; 
education of, 240 ; his school- 
days, 240, 241 ; apprenticed to 
a silk mercer, 241 ; Wine, 243 ; 
Epistle to Bernard Lintott, 
242 i the Present State of 
Wit, 245, 246; his appoint- 
ment to Monmouth, 248 ; 
Rural Sports^ 249 ; The Wife 
of Bath, 250 ; on Flattery 
and Dress, 250; the Fan, 
250; A Conte^nplation npon 
Death, 250 ; Panthea, 250 ; 
Araminta, 250 ; The Shep- 
herd's Week, 250 ; his ap- 
pointment to Hanover, 253 ; 
his Fpigrammatical Petition, 
253 ; Epistle to a Lady, 255; 
^A/'hat d* ye call it, 255 ; a 
Journey to Exeter, 256 ; 
Trivia, i^^j, 258; Three 
Hours before Marriage, 259; 
his ballads, 260 ; his financial 
ventures, 260, 261 ; his 
friendship for the Queens- 
berrys, 261, 262; the Captives, 
263 ; the Fables, id-i^ ; his 
royal appointment, 264 ; Beg- 



gar'' s Opera, 264 ; the play 
prohibited, 266; jumps into 
prominence, 267 ; cared for 
by his friends, 268, 269 ; 
Achilles, 270; death of, 270 ; 
characteristics of, 271 ; his 
epitaph, 271 ; summary of 
his work, 272-274 ; 288, 299. 

Gay, Thomas, 240, 242. 

Gay, William, 239. 

Gay's Chair, 241. 

Gazette, the, 70, ']'T). 

Gentleman' s Magazine, the, 
III, 112, 113, 133, 297. 

George I., 79, 237, 25S, 275, 2S1, 
295. 

George II., 16, 142, 264, 267, 
288. 

George III., 94, 146, 152, 155, 
230, 290. 

George IV., 152. 

George, Prince of Denmark, 70. 

George Augustus, Prince of 
Wales, 286. 

Georgian London, 118. 

Gerard, Baron, 155, 164. 

Gerfarit, 174. 

Germaine, Lady Betty, 299. 

Germany, 178. 

Gibbon, 107, 304, 308. 

Gibbons, Grinley, 184, 227. 

Gigoux, Jean, 180. 

Gilbert, Sir John, 165, 177. 

Gil Bias, Gigoux's, 1800 

Gillray, 51, 147, 203. 

Girodet, 155. 

Glassalt, 72. 

Gobillot, Mile. Reine, 174. 

God Save the King, 41. 

" Golden Cross," 223, 230, 231. 



342 



General Index. 



"Golden Head," the, 300, 302. 

Goldsmith, Henry, 10. 

Goldsmith, Lewis, 160. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, story of, 7- 
9 ; Vkar of Wakefield^ 9, 1 7, 
21, 32; Deserted Village^ 9, 
15, 17, 18,19, 27, 32; late ap- 
pearance of his literary genius, 
9 ; Poems and Plays, 9-32 ; 
Ballads for Dublin street- 
singers, 9; Verses for Jane 
Contarine, 10 ; no evidence 
that he wrote in his youth, 9, 
10; The Traveller J 10, 15, 
17, 18, 19, 20, 32; circum- 
stances responsible for his lit- 
erary career, 10; lawyer, 10; 
physician, 10 ; clergyman, 10 ; 
dislike of scholastic work, 10 ; 
return to it after a first trial of 
writing, 10; takes up the pen 
again to escape from it, 10 ; his 
efforts to relinquish the pen, 
10,11; literature claims him 
until death, 11 ; wrote little 
previous to his second period, 

1 1 ; literary opinions formed 
earlier, 1 1 ; Polite Learn'mg 
in Europe, 11, 15, 22, 26; his 
criticism of publishers, 11 ; 
his views of poetry in the 
Monthly Review, 11; objects 
to blank verse, 11; favours 
rhyme, 1 1 ; champion of char- 
acter and humour, 12; likes and 
dislikes of his predecessors, 

12 ; belonged to the school of 
Addison, Swift, and Prior, 12 ; 
behef in poetry directed at the 
many, 12 ; criticism of Gray's 



writings, 12 ; his advice to 
Gray, 13; his opinion of his 
contemporaries and predeces- 
sors, 12 ; his poetic attitude, 
i^; A New Simile, 13 ; The 
Logiciaits Refuted, 13 ; The 
Double Transformation, 13- 
his acquaintance with the 
minor French poets, 13 ; his 
translations, 13, 14 ; Life of 
Parnell, 15 ; Beauties of 
English Poesy, 15, 20 ; intro- 
duction of politics into his 
works, 15, 16; humanity in 
his poems, 16 ; Edwitt and 
Angelina, 1 7 ; Poems for 
Young Ladies, 17 ; As to 
Any Hermit, 17, 26, 37 ; criti- 
cism of, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18; 
Captivity, 18 ; Threnodia 
Augustalis, 18 ; Retaliation, 

18, 19; the Haunch of Venison, 
18 ; Letter to Mrs. Bunbury, 
18 ; Little Comedy, 18 ; his 
poetry, 19 ; financial returns, 

19, 20; his life a treadmill, 
20; History of Anitnated 
Nature, 20 ; in pursuit of 
dramatic success, 21 ; letters 
to Hodson, 21 ; The Beaux' 
Stratagem, 22 ; the Bee, 22, 
26 ; the Good-Natur^ d Man, 
23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29 ; obsta- 
cles, 23, 28 ; the Citizen of the 
World, 26 ; She Stoops to 
Conquer, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 ; 
the Grumbler, 31; his death, 
31 ; summary of his work, 
32; his Croaker, 52; 58, 61, 
82, 94, 96, no, III, 134, 168, 



General Index. 



343 



172, 174, 176, 177, 181, 182, 
229, 230, 249, 271, 291, 304, 
313. 314, 315, 316, 3^7, 319, 
323, 324, 325- 

" Goldsmith House," 316. 
Goldsmith Road, 316. 
Goldsmith'' s Poetical Works, 

3^3- 

Goodall, 144. 

Goodman's Fields, loi. 

Good-Natur'dMan, T/^^, Gold- 
smith's first comedy, 21, 23, 
24, 25, 26, 27, 29. 

Gordon rioters, the, 146. 

Gordon riots, the, 46. 

Goschen, Mr., 272. 

Goujon, Jean, the door-carver, 
150. 

Gower, Lord, 291. 

Grafton, Duke of, 189. 

Grampian Club, the, 131. 

Granby, the Marquis of, 52. 

Grand Opera, the, Paris, 157. 

Grant, Colonel Francis, no, 

138. 

Gray, Thomas, Goldsmith's crit- 
icism and advice to, 13 ; 
Sketch of his own Character^ 
19 ; 304. 

Great Britain, Public Records 
of, 232. 

Great Hall, the, 193, 195. 

" Great Mews," 231. 

Great Queen Street, 99. 

Great Writers^ 21. 

Grecian Coffee House, the, 134. 

Greek Anthology, 14. 

Green, Charles, 166. 

Green, Valentine, the mezzo- 
tinter, 144. 



Green-Arbour-Court, 7. 
Green Chamber, the, 192. 
" Green Mews," 231. 
Green Street, 294, 295. 
Greville, 204, 217. 
Griffin, the actor, 19, 256. 
Griffiths, Ralph, 12, 312, 313, 

314, 315, 3^1, 3^8. 
Grignion, the engraver, 55. 
Gros, 155. 

Grosvenor, Lady, 135. 
Grotius, 254. 
Grub-street, Z3. 
Grumbler, The, Goldsmith's, 

31- 
Gtiardian, the, ']'], 78, 82, 250. 
Guelderland, 325. 
Guercino, 154. 
Gu^rin, 155. 
Guide de VAmatetir deLivres h 

Vignettes, Cohen's, 180. 
Guido, 154. 
Guiscard, 186. 
Guizot, Madame, 249. 
Gunter, Edmund, 189. 
Gwydyr House, 185. 
G Wynne, the painter, 55. 

H. 

Hackman, James, execution of, 

45- 
Haddock, Captain, 323. 
Hague, the, 153, 282, 283, 306. 
Halifax, Earl of, 15, 246, 297, 

298. 
Hall, John, 42, 55, 146, 147. 
Halle, 309. 

Hall of Antiques, the, 154. 
Hamilton, Anthony, 187. 



344 



General Index. 



Hammersmith, 51. 
Hampstead, 222, 
Hampton Court, 198, 201. 
Handsome Housemaid, The ; 

or, Piety in Fattens, Foole's, 

29. 
Hanmer, Lady Catherine, 289. 
Hanmer, Miss, 240. 
Hanmer, Rev. John, 242. 
Hanover, Court of, 253. 
Hanoverian succession, the, 78. 
Hanway, Jonas, 258. 
Harcourt, Sir William, 259, 

272. 
"Hardcastle, Ephraim " (W. 

H. Pyne), 52, 230. 
Hardcastle, Miss, 30. 
Hardcastles, the, 30. 
Hare and Many Friends, the, 

269. 
Harley, ']'], 186. 
Harrison, 168. 
Harrison, Major-General, 224, 

225. 
Harrison, Mrs., 224. 
Harrow, 41, 53. 
Hartley-Row, 256. 
Hartshorne Lane, 222. 
Harwich, 321. 
Hastings, 31. 
Hastings trial, the, 94. 
Hatfield Peverell, 198. 
Hatton, 189, 

Haunch of Venison, The, Gold- 
smith's, 18. 
Hawkins, Sir John, 17, 116, 117, 

118, 126, 133. 
Hay man, Frank, 49, 52. 
Haymarket, the, 54, 234. 
Hearne, 286. 



" Hearts, the Queen of, " 279. 
Heath, 144, 168, 171. 
Hebrides, the, 114, 118, 119. 
Hedge Lane, 221, 277. 
Hemmgs' Row, 231. 
Hendon, 27. 

Henrietta, Congreve's, 266. 
Henry HL, 222. 
Henry VHL, 1S5, 197, 231. 
Henry, Prince of Wales, 278. 
Hentzner, 198. 

Herbert, Henry, Earl of Pem- 
broke, 34, 55. 
Heretical Book, Whiston's, 286. 
Her Majesty's Theatre, 221. 
Hermit, Goldsmith's, yj. 
Hero of Culloden, the, 43. 
Hervart, M. and Mme. de, 269. 
Hervey, Captain Augustus, 36. 
Hervey, Lady, 36, 288. 
Hervey, Lord, 265, 287, 288. 
Highgate, 222. 

Hi]], Aaron, the playwright, 243. 
Hill, Dr. George Birkbeck, 94, 

136, 138, 139, 140; 141, 142, 

143- 
Hills, Henry, 243. 
Hippokekoa7ta, Count ess of, ■z'^^c). 
History of Animated Nature, 

Goldsmith's, 20. 
History of Music, Burney's, 299. 
History of Our Oxvn Times, 316. 
History of the Refoi'mation, 

Burnet's, 193. 
History of the Revohctiott of 

16S8, Fox's, 156. 
History of the Stage, the, Chet- 

wood's, 57. 
Hoadly, Suspicious Husband, 

135- 



General Index. 



W) 



Hockley-in-the-Hole, 289. 

Hodson, Daniel, 21, 317. 

Hoffmann, 286. 

Hogarth, William, 35 ; Foiir 
Stages of Cruelty, 46 ; 89, 
149, 163, 230, 237, 238, 265, 
276, 288, 300, 301, 302, 303, 

304' 
Hogarth, Mrs. William, 276, 

302. 
Hogarth, Mrs. (mire), 145. 
Holbein's Gate, 186, 193, 196, 

197. 
Holborn, 57. 
Holborn Conduit, 226. 
Holcroft, Thomas, 160 ; the 

Road to Rtdn, 161 ; Travels 

ill Fraiice, 161 ; 296. 
Holkham, 132. 
Holland, 285, 308, 323. 
Holland, Lady, Life of Sydney 

Smith, 205. 
Holland, Lord, 204. 
Holies Street, 93. 
" Holophusikon," Lever's, 292, 

293- 
Home, 513. 
Homer, Barnes's, 286. 
Honeycomb, Will., 258. 
Honeywood, Powell as, 25. 
Hook, Theodore, 53. 
Horace, 206, 208, 209, 218, 237. 
Horace, Maittaire's, 241. 
Horatio, Quin as, 102. 
Horse Grenadier Guards, the, 

292. 
Horse Guards, the, 62. 
Horse Guards Avenue, 184, 195. 
Horse Guard Yard, the, 187, 196. 
Houghton, Lord, 131. 



Howard, Henry, Earl of North- 
hampton, 228, 229. 
Howard, Mrs., 255, 262, 267. 
Howard family, the, 40. 
Howe, Lord, 47, 48. 
Howe, Sophia, 288. 
Howell, 279. 
Hoyden, Miss, 162. 
Huguenot Galley-Slave, the, 

311- 

Human Life, Rogers', 218. 

Humber, the, 321. 

Hummums, the, 134. 

Humphry, Ozias, the miniatui- 
ist, 99. 

Himter, John, 276, 302; his 
museum of Comparative and 
Pathological Anatomy, 303. 

Hunter, William, 303. 

Huot, 180. 

Huth, Mr., 238. 

Hyde, Catherine, 253, 261. 

Hyde, Lady Jane, 253, 261. 

Hyde, Mr., 190. 

Hyde Park, 64. 

Hyde Park Corner, 295. 



I. 



I ago, Macklin as, loi. 

Idler, the, 112. 

Iliad, Homer's, 231, 273. 

" Imperial Resident," the, 281, 

286. 
Imperio-Classical School, the, 

154. 
Importance of Dunkirk Con- 

sider'^d, the, Steele's, 78. 
hnportance of the ^^ Guardian^* 

Considered, the, Swift's, 78. 



346 



General Index. 



Inchbald, Mrs., loS. 
India Office, the, 1S3. 
Ingres, 155. 

Ireland, 62, 76, 136, 29S. 
Ireland, John, the Hogarth com- 
mentator, 147. 
Irene, loi. 
Iris/i Melodies, 219. 
Iron Chest, Cohnan's, 146. 
Irving, Washington, 229. 
Isabey, the miniatmist, 154. 
Isleworth, 228. 
Isocrates, 13. 
Italian opera, the, 159. 
Italian Opera House, the, 49, 
Ivy Lane, 117. 

J. 

Jackson, 54. 

Jacob's Well, 50. 

Jacque, Charles, iSo. 

Jamaica, Governor of, SS. 

James I., 1S4, 189, 198, 234. 

James II., 184, 19S, 278, 287. 

James, INIrs., 71. 

Janin, Jules, iSo. 

Jansen, Bernard, 228. 

Jar din des Plant es, the, 153. 

Jeffery, 204. 

Jekyll, 204. 

yenkinson, 179. 

yeratiy Diddler, Kenney's, 215. 

Jerm}'-, Seth, 320, 321, 322. 

Jermyn Street, y^- 

Jervas, Charles, 261, 262. 

Jesse, J. Heneage, 198. 

Johannot, Tony, 165, iSo. 

John, Lord Cutts, 62. 

John, Lord Hervey, 265, 2SS. 



John of Bologna, 226. 

Johnson, Llizabeth, marries 
Dommico Angelo, 36 ; her 
son, 36. 

Johnson, Mrs., 2S2. 

Johnson, Samuel, o, 16, 17, 28 
29, 30 ; prologue to T/ie Good 
Natu7--d Man, 24 ; Siisfirius 
25 i .sSj 94» 99, 1 01, 109, no, 
III, 112; Memoirs of, 114; 
Anecdotes of, 115; 116, 1x7, 
iiS ; Essay on the Life, Char- 
acter, and. Writings of, 118; 
Jottrney to the Western Is- 
lands of Scotland, 118 ; 119; 
Boswell's Life of, 120-134 ; 
135; His Friends and His 
Critics, 136 ; the Spirit of 
137 ; 142 ; Debates in Parlia- 
ment, 143 ; 229 ; Poets, 239 ; 
249, 272, 299, 304. 

Jchnsoniavca, Mrs. Napier's, 

^13' 115, ^ZZ- 
Johnsonian Miscellanies, Hill's, 

143- 
Jones, Henry, 90. 
Jones, Inigo, 183. 
Jones, John, 224, 225. 
Jonson, Ben, 199, 222, 232. 
Jordaens, 199. 
Jordan, Mrs., 104. 
Joseph Andrezvs, Fielding's, 

20, 16S, 169, 251. 
Jouaust, 181. 

Journal des Scavans, the, 2S0. 
Journal of a Tour to Corsica , 

Boswell's, 139. 
Journal of a Totir to the Heh- 
ridcs, Boswell's, 114, 118, 120, 
121, 122, 126, 129. 



General Index. 



347 



Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon., 
Fielding's, 142. 

Journal to Stella., 76. 

Jourftey to Exeter, Gay's, 256. 

Journey to the Western Is- 
lands of Scotland., Johnson's, 
118, 132, 136. 

Judgment of Paris., the, 289. 

Julia., 30, 208, 209. 

Junius.^ 92. 

K. 

Kauffman, Angelica, 228. 

Kean, Charles, 108. 

Kean, Edmund, 54, 55. 

Kearsley, G., 11 1. 

Keats, John, 16. 

Keble, William, 243. 

Keith, Marshal, 91. 

Kelly, 64. 

Kelly, Hugh, False Delicacy, 
produced by Garrick at Drury 
Lane, 24, 25 ; 27 ; A Word 
to the Wise, 27; 29, 31, 95. 

Kemble, Charles, 105. 

Kemble, John, 105, 146, 157, 
159 ; the Distressed Mother, 
159. 

Kemble, Stephen George, 105, 

Kenney, Jeremy Diddler, 215. 

Kensington, 296. 

Kent, 279. 

Kent, William, 231, 260. 

Kent's Horse Guards, 183, 184. 

Keroualle, Louise Renee de, 
190. 

Kew, 157. 

Keys, Dr., 35. 

King, Dr., 89. 



King's Mews, the, 220, 221, 

23I7 277, 279. 
King's Square Court, 40. 
King Street, 186, 197. 
King Street Gate, 186, 197. 
Kirk, Mrs., 187. 
Kit Cat Club, the, 68, 70, 299. 
Kitty, Prior's, 261, 269. 
Kneller, 71, 284. 
Knightsbridge, 107. 
Kotzebue, loS. 

L. 

Ladies Library, the, 80. 

" Lady Louisa of Leicester 

Square," the, 299. 
Ladfs Last Stake, the, Huth's, 

238. 
La Pausse Agnes, Destouches', 

159. 
La Fontaine, 91, 268, 271. 
Lalauze, M. Adolphe, 181. 
Lallah Rookh, Moore's, 218. 
Lamb, Charles, 105, 163. 
Lambert, George, the scene 

painter, 301. 
" Lammas," 278. 
Lammasland. 278. 
La Monnoye, 14. 
La Motte, M. de, 44. 
Lampson, Mr. Locker, 217. 
Lancret, 181. 
Landguard Fort, 67. 
Landlady, the, 167, 171. 
Landor, 86. 
Landseer, 144, 233. 
Lange, Janet, 180. 
Langford's, 42. 
Languedoc, 30S. 



General Index. 



La Palice, Seigneur de, see 
Chabannes, Jacques de. 

Laporte, 159. 

La Sabliere, Mme. de, 268, 

Lauderdale, the Earl of, 190, 
218. 

Laughton, Professor J. K,, 320, 
322. 

La Vendee, 48. 

Layer, Counsellor Christopher, 
91. 

Lays (Lais), Francois, 157. 

Lear, Garrick as, 135. 

Lee, Miss, 104. 

Le Fleix, 310. 

Leghorn, 35. 

Leicester, Earl of, 278, 279, 2S1. 

Leicester Fields, 35, 275-305. 

Leicester House, 276, 278, 279, 
280, 2S1, 285, 286, 287, 28S 
289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294. 

Leicester Mews, the, 295. 

Leicester Place, 278, 294, 295. 

Leicester Square, 275, 276. 

Leicester Street, 294. 

Lekains, the, 158. 

Lenoir, M. Alexandre, 162. 

Lepel, Mary, 287, 288. 

Le Soeur, Hubert, 226, 295, 

Letter from Italy to Lord Hali- 
fax, Addison's, 15 ; Gold- 
smith's The Traveller sug- 
gested by, 15. 

Letters from a Dandy to a 
Doll, 216. 

Letters to Julia ^ Luttrell's, 203- 
219. 

Letter to Mrs. Bunbury, Gold- 
smith's, 18. 

Lever, Sir A&hton, 292, 293. j 



Lever, Charles, 292. 
Lewes, Sir Watkin, 96. 
Lewis, the actor, 105. 
Lewis, Mrs. Mary, 302. 
Leypoldt and Holt, Messrs., 

Liar, the, Foote's, 49. 

Library School of St. Martin's, 
the, 146. 

Lichfield, 133. 

Life of Goldsmith, Forster's, 8. 

Lifeof Parnell, Goldsmith's, 15. 

Life of Sai7mel Johnson, Bos- 
well's, 120-134; the Oxford 
edition, 123. 

Lille, 319. 

Lilly, William, 224. 

Lincoln, Earl of, 262, 

Lincoln's Inn Fields, 98, 264. 

Linnseus, 91. 

Linton, 173. 

Lintott, Bernard, 243, 247, 248. 

Linwood's Art Needlework, 
Miss, 276, 292. 

Lion d' Argent, the, 163. 

Lions, Landseer's, 233. 

Lisbon, 142. 

Lisburn, Lord, 20. 

Lisle Street, 278, 294. 

Listen, 146. 

Literary Gazette, the, 93. 

Literary Illustrations, Nichols', 
no. 

Literary Magazine, the, 317. 

Litlle Comedy, Goldsmith's, 18. 

Little Dickey, 57. 

Little Newport Street, 277. 

Little Strawberry, 103. 

Livesay, Richard, the engraver, 
302. 



General Index. 



349 



Lives of the Poets^ Gibber's, 133. 

Liviez, M., 38. 

Lloyd, Robert, 106, 227. 

Locket, 237. 

Lofty, 25. 

Logicians Refuted, The, Gold- 
smith's, 13 ; Swift the model 
for, II. 

Lomsbery, 231. 

London, 7, 34, 35, 39, 40, 47, 
72,87, 109, 115, 134, 157,159, 
214, 258, 275, 285, 293, 294, 

323, 325- 
London and Wise, Messrs., 200. 
London County Council, 236, 

23S. 
London militia, 223. 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 

13- 

Long Parliament, the, 223. 

Long Walk, the, 197. 

Lord Chamberlain, the. 189, 196, 
266. 

Lord Keeper's Office, the, 189. 

Lord Ogleby, Garrick and Col- 
man's, 23. 

Lort, Michael, no. 

Lothario, 102. 

Louis XIV., 62, 279. 

Louis XIV. et la Revocatiofi, 
308. 

Louis XIV. et le Dice de Bour- 
gogne, Michelet's, 308. 

Louis XV., 33. 

Louisa, Princess, 264. 

Loutherbourg, Philip de, 42. 

Louvre, the, 153, 154, 156, 184. 

" Lovers' Vows," Mrs, Inch- 
bald's, 108. 

Lowe, Mauritius, 133. 



Lower Park Road, 316. 

Lucas, Lord, 65, 144. 

Lucas's Fusileers, d'T^, 67. 

Lucius, 81. 

Luck, Robert, 240; Miscellany 
of New Poems, 240 ; 243. 

Lucy, Mrs. Egleton as, 265. 

Ludlow Castle, the, English 
man-of-war, 322. 

Lumpkin, Tofiy, 30, 179, 293. 

Lusignan, Garrick as, 135. 

Luttrell, Colonel, 219. 

Luttrell, Henry, 64, loS; Let~ 
ters to Julia, 203-219; opin- 
ions of, 205-216; Crockford 
House, 217; fugitive verses, 
217; his lesser pieces, 218,219. 

Luxembourg, tlie, 155. 

Lydia, 20S, 209. 

Lying Lover, the, Steele's, 66. 

Lyra Elegantiarum, 217. 

- M. 

Mabuse, 192. 

MacArdell, the mezzotinter, 144. 

Macaulay, T. B., 57, 124, 127, 
130, 133. 290. 

MacKinnon, General, 63. 

Mackintosh, 204. 

Macklin, loi, 102. 

Maclean, James, the ** gentle- 
man highwayman," 107. 

Macmillan and Co., Messrs., 
182, 301. 

Macpherson, 114. 

Madame Blaize, Goldsmith's, 
14. 

Magdalen, 61. 

Maginn, 232. 

Maiano, John de, 198. 



350 



General Index. 



Maillard, Mile,, 157. 
Mainwaring, Arthur, 70. 
Maittaire, Horace, 241. 
Maloiie, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 

128, 138, 141, 277. 
Manchester, 293. 
Manley, Mr., 68. 
Manley, Mrs. De la Riviere, 68, 

69, 70. 
Mann, 290. 
Mansfield Park, Miss Austen's, 

108. 
Mantal, 309. 
Maplesden, Margery, 67. 
Mapp, Mrs. Sarah, the Epsom 

bone-setter, 89. 
Marengo, 152. 

Marlborough daughters, the, 285. 
Marlborough, Duchess of, 90, 

266, 268. 
Marlborough, Duke of, 76, Zt^, 

282, 284, 286. 
Mai-lozv, 31. 
Marriage of St. Catherine, Cor- 

reggio's, 154. 
Mars, Mile., 158. 
Marteilhe, Jean, Memoirs of, 

306-325. 
Marvell, Andrew, 189. 
Marville, C, 180. 
Mary, Queen, 62. 
Mason, 304. 
Masters of Wood Engraving, 

Linton's, 173. 
Mathews, Captain, 41. 
Mathews, Charles, the elder, 

146, 157. 
Matted Gallery, the, 192. 
Matthews, 88. 
Maurus, Terentianus, 306. 



Mazarine, 194. 
Mead, Dr., 2S6. 
Meadows, Kenny, 165. 
Meissonier, iSo. 
Melcombe, Lord, 288. 
Memoirs, Carleton's, 63. 
Memoirs of a Protestant, 306- 

325- 

Memoirs of the Life and 
Writings of the late Dr. 
Samuel Johnson, 114. 

Memorandum Book for 1805, 
170. 

Menagiana, Goldsmith's ac- 
quaintance with, 13. 

Mercutio, Lewis as, 105. 

Merry Monarch, 225. 

Merton, 61. 

Metastasio, 91. 

Metropolitan Board of Works, 
the, 236. 

Mews, the, of Richmond Ter- 
race, 184. 

Michelet, 308. 

Middlesex, Lady, 288, 289. 

Military Garden, the old, 278. 

Military Library, the, 56. 

Millar, Andrew, 20. 

Milner, Dr. John, 316. 

Milton, John, 237. 

Minor, Foote's, 49. 

Mirror of Aimisement, 171. 

Miscellany of New Poems, 
Luck's, 240. 

Mr. Bicker staff ''s Lucttbratiojis, 
76. 

Mitchel, the banker, 47. 

Mohocks, the, 247, 258. 

Moira, Lord, 48. 

Molifere, 66, 97. 



General Index. 



35 



Molly Mog, Gai''s ballad on, 

273- 
Monarchy the famous white 

charger, 42. 
Moncrieff, 88. 

Monk, Duke of Albemarle, 186. 
Monkstorm, 60. 
Monmouth, Duchess of, 248, 

253>259- 
Monmouth, Duke of, 1S7, 248. 
Monsey, Dr. Messenger, 94. 
MonsieiLrTonson^ the author of, 

87-108 ; 217. 
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortlcy, 

260. 
Montagu, 304. 
Montaigne, 11. 

Montgomery, Earl of, 186, 235. 
Monthly Review, the, 11, 312, 

3'^3^ 316, Z^7i jiS. 
Monvel, 158. 
Moore, Arthur, 151. 
Moore, Thomas, 204; his 

Diary, 208, 217; Lallah 

Rookh^ 218 ; 219. 
Morbleu, Monsieur, 88. 
More, Hannah, 134. 
Morecombe-lake, 256. 
Morel-Fatio, Antoine Leon, the 

marine artist, 310, 311. 
Morgan, Professor Augustus de, 

297. 
Morley, Professor Henry, 137. 
Morning, 257. 
Morning Chronicle, the, 163. 
Morocco, 200. 
Morris, Henry, 158. 
Morrison collection, the, ^"j, 
Moses, 171, 176. 
Motet, the champion faretir, 39. 



Moulsey, 210. 
Mountain, 60. 
Mulready, 176, 177, 181. 
Murphy, Arthur, 126, 134, 135 ; 

tlie Citizen, 159. 
Murray, Mr. John, 54, 265. 
Murray, Sir Robert, 189. 
Musee dcs Monuments, the, 162. 
Museum Leverianum, the, 294. 
My Own Boastings, Angelo's, 

54- 
Mylius, August, 17S. 
Myra, lines to. Goldsmith's, 14. 

N, 
Nag's Head Yard, 301. 
Nairne, the Highland girl of, 

140. 
Nantes, the Edict of, 309. 
Napier, Rev. Alexander, 113, 

120, 128,132, 133, 136, 137. 
Napier, Mrs., Johnsoniatia, 

ii3» 115' ^33- 
National Gallery, the, 220, 231, 

233, 238. 
National Portrait Gallery, the, 

231, 261. 
Neapolitan Club, the, 46, 204. 
Nelson's Column, 233. 
Netherlands, the, 312, 324. 
Neville, Miss, 31. 
Netv Atalantis, the, 68, 80. 
New Bath Guide, Anstey's, 18. 
Newbury, F., 167. 
Newcastle Theatre, the, 105. 
Newcnme, Clive, 165. 
Newcomes, the, 50. 
New Lisle Street, 294. 
Newmarket, 210. 
Newport, the Earl of, 278, 



5^2 



General Index. 



Newport House, 2yy^ 

New Simile^ A, Goldsmith's, 13 ; 
Swift the model for, 13. 

New South Wales, 134. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, 276, 296, 
298, 299, 300, 301. 

Newton : his Friend : and his 
Niece, 297. 

Nichols, 75, 'jG, no, 300, 302. 

Nicolini, 285. 

Night, Hogarth's, 237. 

Nightingale, the, 320, 321, 322. 

Night Thoughts, Young's, Gold- 
smith's interest in, 12. 

Nimes, 310. 

Nivernais, the 'Duke de, a for- 
eign prot6ge of, 33. 

Nodes Ambrosiance, the, 206. 

Nodier, Charles, 180. 

Nore, the, 2S2. 

Normanby, Marquis of, 186. 

Normandy, 222. 

Norris, Henry, S7. 

Northampton House, 228. 

Northcote, 99, 142, 143, 147. 

Northern France, 150. 

Northumberland, Duke of, 22S, 
229, 230. 

Northumberland Hotel, 230. 

Northumberland House, 220, 
221, 227, 229, 230, 238. 

Northumberland Street, 222, 
227. 

Norwood, 289. 

Notre Dame, 153. 

Nottinghams, the, ^%. 

Novelisfs Library, Roscoe's, 
176. 

Novelisfs Magazine, Harri- 
son's, 168, 169, 172. 



O. 

Gates, Titus, 227. 

O'Brien, Nelly, 304. 

O'Connor, John, 276. 

Ode on Mr. Pelham, Garrick's, 
141. 

Old Bailey, the, 44, 91, 323. 

Old Whig, the, 57, 58. 

Oldys^ the antiquary, 92. 

Oliver Goldsmith ; a Biography, 
230. 

On a Beautiful Youth struck 
blittd with Lightning, Gold- 
smith's, 14. 

On the Sublime and Beautiful, 
Burke's, 313. 

Opera House buildings, the, 54. 

" Ophtlialmiater," 89. 

Opie, John, 99, 147, 149, 296. 

Orange Coffee House, the, 54. 

Orange Street, 279, 296, 301. 

Orestes, 159, 

Ormond, the Dukes of, 60, 62, 
187. 

Osbaldeston, Simon, 235. 

Osbaldistone, Fra?ik^ 165. 

Ossianic controversy, the, 114. 

Ostend, 48, 'J2i' 

Otway, 102. 

Oudenarde. 2S5. 

Overall, Mr. W. H., 277. 

Ovid, 247. 

Owen, Henry, 72. 

Oxford, 6t. 

Oxford, Lord, 253. 

Oxfordshire, 259, 262. 



Paine, Thomas, 161 ; Rights 
of Man, i6i. 



General Index. 



W 



Palace, 74. 

Palais de Justice, the, 162. 

Palais du Tribunat, see Tribu- 

nat, the. 
Palais Royal, the, 160, 163. 
Palmer, Barbara, 1S9, 193, 224. 
Palmer, Jack, the actur, 105, 106. 
Pamela^ Pope's, 74. 
Pamela, Richardson's, 20. 
Panopticon, the, 276. 
Pantagruel, 30. 
Panthea, Gay's, 250. 
Pantheon, the, 135. 
Paoli, General, 41. 
Parchment Library, 1S2. 
Paris, 22, y^, 38, 39, 43, 47, 145, 

149, i5o> 153, 164, 210, 2S0, 

307- 
Paris, Congreve as, 289. 
Park, 74. 

Parker, James, 169. 
Parkinson, Mr., 293. 
Park Lane, 316. 
Parliament Street, 183, 197. 
Parnell, 313. 
Parr, Dr., 94, 95. 
Parsons, 227. 
Pasqtcin, Fielding's, 23, 
Pastorals, the, 247. 
Paternoster Row, 314. 
Patronage of British Art, 169. 
Paumier, M. Henri, 311, 324. 
Pavia, 14. 

" Payne, Honest Tom," 232. 
Paynes, The Two, Dobson's, 

233- 
Peckham, 8. 

Peckham Academy, 316. 
Peel, 220. 
Pelham^ 204. 



Pelham, Mr., 141, 142. 

Pembroke, Earl of, 186 ; see also 
Herbert, Henry. 

Pennant, 196 ; Some Account of 
London, 197; 198,294. 

Penshurst, 279. 

Pcntvtieazel, Lady, 50. 

Pepys, Samuel, 188, 192, 193, 
200; his Diary, 201, 202; 
224, 279, 2S0. 

Perceval, Sir John, 83. 

Percies, the palace of, 221, 228. 

Percy, Algernon, Earl of North- 
umberland, 228. 

Percy, Thomas, 17, 76, no, 134, 

223, 228. 
Perreau, the Brothers, 44. 
Perreau, Farmer, 44. 
Peterborough, Lord, 190. 
Peters, Cromwell's chaplain, 99, 

224, 225. 
Petersham, 262. 
Peter the Great, 291. 
Petits-Augustins, the, 162. 
Petit-Trianon, 103. 
Phldre, Duchesnois in, 157. 
Philip, Earl of Montgomery, 

235- 
Philips, Ambrose, Pastorals, 

251. 
Philips, John, Splendid Shill- 

i^K^i 243- 
Phillips, Sir Richard, Walk 

from London to Kew, 157. 
"Phiz," 166. 
Piazza, the, 42, 45, 135. 
Picart, M., 159. 
Picart's Theatre, 159. 
Piccadilly, 48, "jt,, 175, 262, 295. 
Pic-Nic Society, the, 51. 
23 



354 



General Index. 



Pimlico, 232. 
Pinchbecks, the, 107. 
Pindar, Peter, 47, 99, 103. 
Pindaric Odes^ Thomas Gray's, 

12 ; Goldsmith's criticism of, 

12. 
Pine, 301. 
Pmwell, G, J., 177. 
Piozzi, Hesther Lynch, 115, 116, 

118, 126, 133, 299. 
Place du Carrousel, the, 152. 
Place Vendome, the, 151. 
Plagiary, Sir Fret fill, 97. 
Pleasures of Memory, Rogers', 

174. 
Pliant, Sir Paid, Macklin as, 

lOI. 

Poems for Young Ladies, Gold- 
smith's, 17. 

Poems of Golds7Jiilh and Par- 
nell, 313. 

Poetical Miscellany, Steele's, 
250. 

Poetry, Temple on, 26. 

Poets, Johnson's, 239. 

Poinsinet, Comedie Lyrique, 160. 

Poirson, M. V. A., 181. 

Polite Learning in Europe, 
Goldsmith's, 11, 15, 22, 26. 

PoUnitz, 91. 

Polly, Miss Fenton as, 265 ; 
266, 26S. 

"Poly-Olbion," Drayton's, 278. 

Pont Neiif, 151. 

Pontoise, 150. 

Pope, Alexander, Goldsmith's 
admiration for the work of, 
12; 13, 16, 19, 32, 58, 74, 83, 
91, 109, 128, 142, 143, 176, 
242, 2^6, 247, 248, 249, 250, 



251. 253, 255, 258, 259, 260, 

262, 263, 266, 269, 270, 271, 

273, 2S8. 
Portland, Lord, 2S5. 
Portsmouth, 47, 48, 49. 
Portsmouth, Duchess of, 190, 

191, 194. 
Portugal Street, 98. 
Poultry, the, 120, 312, 314. 
Powell, as Honeywood, 25. 
Praed, W. M., 203. 
PrcEterita, Ruskin's, 142. 
Prague, 91. 
Present State of Wit, Gay's, 

245, 246. 
Preville, 39, 158. 
Primrose, George, 102, 167, 169, 

179, 181. 

Primrose, Mrs., 30, 171, 176, 

180, 181. 

Primrose, Olivia, 167, 169, 170, 

171, 173, ^n- 

Pri77irose, Sophia, 168,169, 173, 

i75» ^1^^ 179- 

Priinrose, Doctor, 30, 167, 169, 
170, 171, 173, 175. 176, 179, 
180, 181. 

Prince Arthiir, lifi. 

Prince Titi, History of, 133. 

Principia, the, 297. 

Prior, Matthew, Goldsmith's 
admiration for and imitation 
of, 12, 13 ; accuses him of 
plagiarism, 15; 19, 134, 176, 
237; Female Phaeton, 240; 
260, 261, 269, 2'J2, 282, 283, 
298, 314. 

Prior Park. 102. 

Pritchard, Mrs., loi. 

Privy-Council Office, the, 186. 



General Index. 



355 



Privy Garden, the, i8S, 189, 190, 

196. 
Privy Stairs, the, 192, 193, 201, 
Procession, the, 62. 
Procession to Churchy Bewick's, 

173. 

Prtte, 70, 74, 75, ^d. 

Fryor, Samuel, 237. 

Psalmanazar, George, 143. 

Public Advertiser, the, iii, 
292. 

Publick Spirit of the Whigs, 
Swift's, 78. 

Pulteney, 259. 

Punchinello, 225. 

Purdon, Ned, Goldsmith's epi- 
taph on, 14. 

Puttick and Simpson, Messrs., 

303- 
Pye, 169. 
Pyne, W. H., 53, 230. 

Q. 

Qtiack Mazirus, Dryden's, 64. 
Quantin, iSr, 

Quarterly Review, the, 31 t. 
Queen Charlotte, the, Howe's 

vessel, 48. 
Queensberry, the Duchess of, 

Z1, 47, 261, 266, 267, 268, 

270, 271. 
Queensberry, the Duke of, 37, 
240, 261, 263, 267, 268, 270. 
Queen Street, 99. 
Quin, the actor, 102, 103. 
Quisguiliics, Dibdin's, 147. 

R. 
Racine, 158. 
Raimbach, Abraham, 42, 55; 



engravings of, 144; birth of, 
145 ; childhood of, 145 ; edu- 
cation of, 146 ; apprenticed to 
Hall, 146 ; his first definite 
employment, 148 ; in Paris, 
149 ; a view of Napoleon, 152- 
163 ; returns to England, 163 ; 
his Memoirs, 163 ; his death, 
164. 

Ralph, Case of Authors by Pro- 
fession, 22. 

Rambach, F. E., 309. 

Rambler, 25. 

Ramsay, Allan, 296. 

Ranelagh, 135, 288. 

" Rape of the Lock," Miscel- 
lany, Lintott's, 247. 

Raphael, TransJiguratio7z, 153. 

Ravenet, 146. 

Raymond, Mr. Samuel, 134. 

Rayner, 240. 

Reay, Miss Martha, 45. 

Records of My Life, Taylor's, 

52, 93- 
Redas, the Frenchman, 54. 
" Red Cross," the, 239. 
Reed, Isaac, 313, 314. 
Reflectiojts on the French Revo- 

lutiojt, TOO. 

Rehearsal, Buckingham's, 255. 
Religious Tract Society, the, 

31I' 318- 
Reliques of Ancient Poetry^ 

Percy's, 17, 223. 
Rembrandt, 153. 
Reminiscences, Angelo's, 33- 

56. 
Rent Day, Raimbach's, 144. 
" Repository of Arts," 175. 
Restless, Tom, 112, 113. 



356 



General Index. 



Retaliation, Goldsmith's, i8, 19, 
5i» 96. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 18, 35, 
99, 100, 117, 121, 134, 137, 
142, 143) 144, 155' 229, 276, 
277i 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 

305- 
Rl-ienish Wine House, the, 237. 
Rich, Christopher, 67, 265, 268. 
Richard, Earl of Barrymore, 50. 
Richard II., 231. 
Richardson, the fire-eater, 280. 
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 

20 ; 22. 
Richelieu, the tomb of, 163. 
Richland, Miss, 25. 
Richmond Terrace, Mews, 184, 

185, 190. 
Richter, Ludwig, 179. 
Rights of Man, Paine's, 161. 
Rivals, The, Sheridan's, 29, 
Rivarol, 206. 
Rivella, 68. 
Rivett, John, 226. 
Road to Ruin, Holcroft's, 161, 

296. 
Robe Chamber, the, 192. 
Roberson & Co., Messrs., 304. 
Robespierre, 154. 
Rochefoucauld, 181. 
Roehampton, 226. 
Rogers, 174, 204, 205, 206, 218; 

Human Life, 218. 
Rollos, Mr. John, So. 
Romeo and jfuliet, 38. 
Romney, J., 171, 175. 
Rosciad, Churchill's, 106. 
Roscius, 39. 
Roscoe, 176. 
Rose, the Royal gardener, 200. 



Rose and Crown, the, 312. 
Rose, Dr., of Chiswick, 36. 
" Rose" Inn, the, 273. 
Rotterdam, 306. 
Roubillac, 38. 
Rouen, 150. 

Roustan, Mameluke, 152. 
Rowe, Fair Penitent of, 102. 
Rowlandson, Thomas, 38, 47, 

48, 49, 55, 167, 174, 175, 176, 

182. 
" Rowley," stallion, 231. 
Roxane, Duchesnois as, 157. 
Royal Academy, the, 49, 99, 

148, 155, 276, 304. 
Royal Anne, the, 321. 
Royal Society, the, 279. 
Royal United Service Institu- 
tion, the, 184, 195. 
Rubens, 153, 199. 
Rubini, 156. 
Rudd, Mrs. Margaret Caroline, 

trial of, 44. 
Rudge, Miss, 44. 
" Rummer " Tavern, the, 237. 
Run ci man, Alexander, the 

painter, 302. 
Rupert, Prince, 190. 
Rural Sports, Gay's, 249, 250, 

251. 
Ruskin, John, Prceterita, 142, 

143. 
Russell, Lord, 156. 
Russell Street, 114. 
Ryland, the engraver, 55. 



St. Antoine, M., 231. 

St. Denis, 150. 

Sabines, the, David's, 154. 



General Index. 



357 



Sabloni^re Hotel, the, 300. 

" Sacharissa," Waller's, 27S, 

280. 
St. George's, Hanover Square, 

36. 
St. Germain's, igi. 
St. Giles, S'/, 222. 
St. Huberti, Mile., 157. 
St. James's Church, y^f 74- 
St. James's Palace, 100, 186. 
St. James's Park, 185, 187, 221. 
St. James's Park menagerie, 

234- 
St. James's Square, 51, 292. 
St. John's College beer, 53. 
St. Maclou Church, the, 150. 
St. Margaret's, y 21- 
St. Martin's Church, 220, 221, 

225, 227, 231, 232, 234. 
St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, y^- 
St. Martin's Lane, 145, 234, 

277. 
St. Martin's, the Parish of, 27S. 
St. Martin's Place, 161. 
St, Martin's Street, 296, 298, 

299, 300, 301. 
St. Mary Rounceval, hospital of, 

221. 
St. Patrick, the Roman Catholic 

Church of, 40. 
St. Paul's Churchyard, 147. 
St, Stephen's, 183. 
Salisbury, England, 35, 167. 
Salisbury Plain, 256. 
Salisbury Square, 317. 
Salon, the French, 156, 164, 
Salvator, 40. 
Sandby, Thomas, the architect, 

197. 
Sandwich, Lord, 45, 201. 



Sans Pareil, the French vessel, 

47- 
Sans Souci Theatre, the, 295 . 
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 

90. 
Satchell, Miss, 105. 
Savage, 81, 83, 
Savile, Sir George, 276, 291. 
Savile House, 290, 291, 292. 
Saxe, Marshal, 91. 
Sayer, James, 104. 
Sayes Court, 291. 
Schicksal der Protestanten in 

Frmikreich, Rambach's, 309, 

312. 
School for Scandal y 105. 
Scot, 225. 

Scotland Yard, 1S5, 195, 228. 
Scottish Office, the, 196. 
Scribleriad^ the, 97. 
Scriblerus Club, the, 253. 
Scroope, 225. 

Scrub, Mrs, Abington as, 1C4. 
Scurlock, Miss Mary, marries 

Richard Steele, 70, 71, 72. 
Scurlock, Mrs., 'J2)-' 74- 
Seasons, the, 237. 
Sedley, Catharine, Countess of 

Dorchester, 287. 
Sefton, Lord, 217. 
Sermons, Foster's, 136. 
Sesenheim, 179. 
Seven Years' War, the, 33. 
Sharpe, 175. 

Shaw, Rev. William, 114. 
Shee, 149. 
Shepherd's Week, Gay's, 25c, 

251, 252, 254. 
Sheppard, Jack, 90, 277. 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The 



358 



General Index. 



/Rivals, 29; 41, 95, 97, 98, 146, 

147. 

Sheridan, Tom, 41, 49. 

Ske Stoops to Cotiguer, Gold- 
smith's, 27 ; first production 
of, 28; its success, 29, 3c, 31 ; 
his last dramatic work, 31 : 
his best production, 32. 

Shield Gallery, the, 192. 

Short View of the Immorality 
and Profaneness of the Eng- 
lish Stage, Collier's, 66. 

Shrewsbury, Duke of, 285, 

Shuter, as Croaker, 24, 25 ; 
anecdote of, 52. 

Siddons, Mrs., 98, 105, 304. 

Sidney Alley, 294. 

Sigisrminda, 238. 

Simon, John, 284. 

Sion House, at Isleworth, 228. 

Sir Tremejtdotis, 259. 

Sketch of his own Character, 
Gray's, 19. 

Sleep-Walker, the, 51. 

Smirke, Sir Robert, 14S, 165, 
199. 

Smith, Adam, 133. 

Smith, Anker, 170. 

Smith, " Gentleman," the actor, 
105. 

Smith, J. T., 197; Westmin- 
ster^ 197 ; 198. 

Smith, " Rainy Day," 299. 

Smith, Sydney, 204; Lady Hol- 
land's Life of, 205 ; 206. 

Smith, Thomas, 322, 323. 

Smithfield, 61, 280. 

Smollett, 38. 

Sneer, Palmer as, 106. 

Soane Museum, the, 238. 



Societe des Ecoles du Dimanche, 
the, 310, 311. 

Society of Antiquaries, the, 197. 

Society of Artists of Great 
Britain, the, 238. 

Society of Arts, the, 300. 

Soho, 35, 40, 107. 

Some Accou7it of Loftdon, Pen- 
nant's, 197. 

Somers, 246. 

Somerset House Gazette, the, 52. 

Soubise, 47. 

South American Ode, A, Gold- 
smith's, 14. 

Southampton, 48. 

South Kensington, 49, 170, 241. 

Spectator, the, 60, 76, >]"], S3, 
187, 200, 244, 246, 283, 2S6. 

Spence, 266. 

Spirit of Johnson, the, 137. 

Spithead, 321. 

Splendid Shilling, the, Philips's, 
243- 

Spring Gardens, 183, 185, 187, 
221, 234, 235, 236, 238. 

Spy, the, brigantine, 320. 

''Sqtdre, the, 170, 177, 181. 

Squire Westiern, Picart as, 159, 
t6o. 

Sgtiirrel, the, privateer, 322. 

Stadtholder's collection, the, 

153- 
Stage, the, 106. 
Standard Library, the, 136. 
Steele, Richard, the elder, 60. 
Steele, Richard, the latest Life 

of, 57-86; The Ftineral, 57; 

birth of, 60 ; his early life, 60 ; 

at the Charterhouse, 60 ; the 

Christian Hero, 61, 65 ; at 



General Index. 



359 



Christ Church, 6i ; at Merton, 
6i ; his intercourse with Addi- 
son, 6i ; a " gentleman of the 
army," 61-63; his duel, 64; 
the Lying Lover, 66 ; the 
Te7ider Husband, 66 ; his 
chancery suit, 67 ; duped, 68 ; 
his marriage, 69 ; death of his 
wife, 69 ; appointed Gentle- 
man Waiter to Prince George, 
70 ; Gazetteer, 70 ; his second 
marriage, 70-73; his lavish 
living, 74 ; his income, 74 ; 
his letters to his wife, 75 ; 
Commissioner of Stamps, "j"] ; 
dallying with the stage, ^^ ; 
death of his mother-in-law, 
"]"] ; his controversy with Swift, 

78 ; in politics, 78 ; impeached, 
79; Apology for Himself a7id 
his Writings, 79 ; knighted, 

79 ; his death, 79 ; Conscious 
Lovers^ 79 ; death of Lady 
Steele, 79 ; his connection with 
Drury Lane Theatre, So; new 
light on the work of, 80; his 
character, 80 ; branded as a 
drunkard, 82 ; his standing as 
a man of letters, 83 ; the 
Taller, 244 ; 246, 250 ; Poeti- 
cal Miscellany, 250 ; 255, 256, 
257, 283, 284. 

Steele, Lady, 71 ; death of, 79. 
Steel Yard, the, 200. 
Steenie. 235. 

Steevens, George, the Shake- 
speare critic, 147, 259. 
Stella, 245, 283, 298. 
Sterne, 39, 169. 
Stock, Elliot, 314. 



Stockbridge, 78, 256. 

Stocks Market, 226. 

Stone Gallery, the, 190, 191. 

Storace, Stephen, 146, 147. 

Stothard, 144, 145, 167, 168, 

169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 181. 
Strafford, Lady, 283, 285. 
Strafford, Lord, 283. 
Strand, 221. 

Stratford Jubilee, the, yj. 
Stratton, 286. 
Strawberry Hill, 200. 
Strawberry Hill Press, the, 

51 

Stretch, Margaret, marries Rich- 
ard Steele, 69 ; her death, 69 

71- 

Strype, 227. 

Stuarts, the, 196. 

Stubbs, George, 42. 

Suckling, 229. 

Suffolk, Lady, 255. 

Suffolk House, 228. 

Suffolks, the, 228. 

Sun, The, 92. 

Sunderland, Countess of, 278 ; 

the second, 280. 
Sunderland, Lord, 'Ji' 
Superville, M, Daniel de, 307, 

324- 
Surgeons' Hall, 7, 46. 
Survey of 1592, Agas', 221, 

222, 223. 
Suspicious Husband, Hoadly's, 

135- 
Suspirius, Johnson's, 25. 
Sussex, the Duke of, 46. 
Sutton Street, 40. 
Swan Close, 278. 
Sweet William'' s Farewell to 



360 



General Index. 



Black Ey^d Susan, Gay's, 
260. 

Swift, Jonathan, Goldsmith's 
admiration for and imitation 
of, 12, 13 ; 58, 76, -jT, 78 ; the 
Importance of the " Guar- 
dian'''' considered^ ^%-, Pub- 
lick Spirit of the 'Whigs, 78; 
81, 84, 94, 109 ; City Shower, 
213, 242 ; 243, 245, 246, 247, 
249, 252, 253, 254, 257, 261, 
262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 
268, 270, 271, 273, 282, 286, 
298. 

Swivellers, the, 165. 

Sybaris, 209. 

Sydney, 134. 

Sydney, Algernon, 278. 

Sydney, Dorothy, 278. 

Sydney, Robert, Earl of Leices- 
ter, 278. 

Symes, Elinor, 60. 

Sympathy, Dodsley's, 16. 

T. 

Taine, M., 269. 

Tales, Gay's, 273. 

Tales of the Genii, Cooke's, 
148. 

Talking Oak, Tennyson's, 18. 

Talma, the tragedian, 159. 

Taste, Foote's, 40. 

Tatler, the, 60, 76, %■}>■> 244, 
245, 246, 257. 

Taylor, " Chevalier," see Tay- 
lor, John, the elder. 

Taylor, John, the elder, 89-92. 

Taylor, John, the Second, 92, 

lOI. 



Taylor, John, the Third, 88; 
Monsieur Tonson, 87, 88; 
his grandfather, 89 ; his father, 
92 ; an oculist, 92 ; in jour- 
nalism, 92 ; as a raconteur, 93 ; 
Records of My Life, 52, 93 ; 
anecdotes of literary men, 93- 
100 ; anecdotes of actors and 
actresses, 100-106. 

Taylor, John Stirling, 93. 

Tedder, Mr. H. R., no, 130. 

Teillagory, the elder, 34. 

Temple, the, 94, 135. 

Temple Bar, 219, 278. 

Temple, Sir William, on Poetry, 
26, 122, 131. 

Tender Husband, the, Steele's, 
57, 66. 

Tenison, Archbishop, 300. 

Tennant, 273. 

Tennis Court, the, 186, 187, 
197. 

Tennyson, Lord Alfred, Talk- 
ing Oak, 18. 

Texier, 180. 

Thackeray, W. M., Denis 
Duval, 44 ; 156, 206 ; English 
Humourists, 239. 

Thames, the, 184, 185, 193, 
201, 321, 323. 

Thatched House Tavern, the, 

35- 
Theatre de la Republique, the, 

see Theatre Frangais. 
Theatre de la Republique et des 

Arts, the, see Grand Opera, 

the. 
Theatre Frangais, the, 152, 156, 

158. 
Theobald, 256, 



General Index. 



361 



Theocritus, 251. 

Theodore, King of Corsica, 91. 

Thomas, George, 177. 

Thompson, Mr., 87. 

Thompson, Mr. Hugh, 182. 

Thompson, John, 173, 176. 

Thomson, 271. 

Thornhill, Sir William, 170, 
171, 181. 

Thrale, Mrs., 116, 118, 127, 136. 

Thrale's, 135. 

Three Hours before Marriage, 
Gay's, 259. 

Threnodia Augustalis, Gold- 
smith's, 18. 

Thurston, 14S, 173. 

" Tickler," 206. 

Tilt-Yard, the, 1S6, 196, 197. 

Tilt-yard Guard, the, 67. 

" Timon's Villa," 276. 

Tipkin, Mr., 57. 

Titian, 228. 

Tofts, Mary, the Godalming 
rabbit-breeder, 90. 

To Iris in Bow Street, Gold- 
smith's, 14. 

Tom Jones h Londres, Des- 
forges', 159. 

Tompkins, 223. 

Tonson, 76, 249, 286. 

Tonson and Lintott, Messrs., 
260. 

Tonson and Watts, Messrs., 
241. 

Tooke, Home, 41. 

Toplady, 299. 

Tower Guard, the, 65. 

Tower of London, the, 65, 200. 

Towers, Rev. Joseph, 118. 

Town Talk, 68. 



Trafalgar Square, 220, 231, 

233- 
Transfiguration, Raphael's, 

153- 

Translations, Gay's, 273. 

Traveller, The, Goldsmith's, 
10, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 2)'^, 
no. 

Travels in France, Holcroft's, 
161. 

Treasury, the, 187, 189. 

Treatise on Human Knowl- 
edge, the, 83. 

Tree, Miss Ellen, 108, 217. 

Tremamondo, Dominico Angelo 
Malevolti, see Angelo, Do- 
minico. 

Tribunat, the, i6o. 

Trinity College, 7. 

Trivia, Gay's, 232, 244, 257, 
258. 

Trotter, T., 11 1. 

Tuileries Gardens, the, 151, 152. 

Tunbridge, 89. 

Tunbridge Wells, 262. 

Turin, 283. 

Turner, 144, 149. 

' Twas when the Seas were roa7-- 
ing, Gay's, 260, 273. 

Twickenham, 262, 293. 

Twopenny postboys, 204. 

Tyburn, 44, 45. 

Tyers, Jonathan, 112. 

Tyers, Tom, 112, 113, 114, 

133- 
Tyne, the, 321. 

U. 
Underhill, John, 239, 249. 
Union Club, 221, 233. 



362 



General Index. 



Upper Mews Gate, 232. 

Ursa Major, 133. 

Utrecht, the Treaty, 78, 282, 

324- 
Uwins, Thomas, 172. 

V. 

Valerie Marneffe, 44. 
Vanbrugh, 31 ; Confederacy^ 50; 

237- 
Van Dyck, 278, 300. 
Vane Room, the, 192. 
Van Nost, 295. 
Van Woortz, M., 308. 
Vatican, the, 153. 
Vauxhall, 47. 

Vauxhall Gardens, 112, 236. 
Vendee, La, 310. 
Venetian Senators^ Evelyn's, 

229. 
Venice, 42. 

Venice Preserved^ Otway's, 102. 
Venus de' Medici, the, 153. 
Veratius, Gibbon's, 107. 
Vernes, M. Felix, 308, 309, 310. 
Vernet, Carle, 154. 
Vernet, Horace, 154. 
Versailles, 191. 
Verses, Goldsmith's, for Jane 

Contarine, 10. 
Vertue, 197. 
Very's, 163. 
Vestris, the elder, 157. 
Vetusta Monumenta^ the, 197. 
Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith's, 

9» i7> 21, 32, 166, 167, 168, 

169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 

I75» 176, 177, 178, i79» iSo. 
181, 182, 314. 



Vidal, M. Frangois, 308, 309, 
310 ; La Fuite du Camisard, 
310. 

Village Politicians, Raimbach's, 
144, 164. 

Viner, Sir Robert, 226. 

Virginians, the, 91. 

Vitruvitis Britannicus, Camp- 
bell's, 183. 

Voltaire, 14, 91, 100, 297. 

W. 

Wadham College, 123. 
Wakefield, 102, 179. 
Wakefield family, 170. 
Wale, 238. 
Wales, 70, JT). 

Wales, the Prince of, 46, 263. 
Wales, the Princess of, 35, 263. 
Walesby, F. P., 123. 
Walker, 265. 

Walker, the engraver, 168. 
Walker, Dr. Thomas, 60. 
Walk from London to Kew, 

Phillips', 157. 
Waller, 220, 223, 278. 
Wallingford House, 234, 235. 
Walpole, Horace, 30, 51, 91, 

103, 107, 124, 141, 142, 172, 

200, 225, 226, 229, 290. 
Walpole, Sir Robert, 262, 265, 

266. 
Walton, 67. 
Warburton, 102, 103. 
Ward, Dr, Joshua, 89. 
Wardour Street, 40. 
Wardrobe, the old, 195. 
Wargrave Court, 50. 
Wargrave-on-Thames, 50, 51. 



General Index. 



365 



Warwick Lane, 233. 
Watson, the mezzotinter, 144. 
Watteau, 181. 

Welch, Saunders, the magis- 
trate, 301. 
Welcome from Greece^ Gay's, 

Wenman, J., 167, 178. 

Wentworth, Peter, 285. 

Wenzel, Baron de, 92, 

West, Benjamin, Battle of the 
Boyne, 42 ; 99 ; Cromwell dis- 
solving the Long Parliament^ 
147 ; 149, 155; Death on the 
Pale Horse^ 155. 

Westall, Richard, 147, 175. 

West Indian, Richard Cumber- 
land, 27, 97. 

Westmeath, 8. 

Westminster, 73, 107, 145, 188. 

Westminster, Smith's, 197. 

Westminster Abbey, 38, 185, 
221, 222, 270, 272. 

Westminster Bridge Road Am- 
phitheatre, 35. 

Westminster Hall, 243, 

Westminster, Palace of, 220. 

Westminster Review, the, 239. 

Weston, Lord High Treasurer, 
226. 

Wexford, the county of, 62. 

What d'' ye Call it^ Gay's, 255. 

Wheatley, 202, 295, 

Whigs, the, 78. 

Whistlecraft , 204. 

Whiston, 286. 

Whitcomb Street, 222, 277. 

Whitefoord, Caleb, 96. 

Whitehall Bridge, 201. 

Whitehall Court, 183, 195. 



Whitehall Gardens, 35, 185, 

201. 
Whitehall Gate, 196. 
Whitehall, Old, 56, 'j^^ 74, 

188, 201, 202, 221, 224, 

225. 
Whitehall Palace, 234, 
Whitehall Palace Stairs, 191, 

193, T95, 282. 
Whitehall Yard, 196. 
White's, 204. 
Whittingham, 170, 173. 
Wife of Bath, the, Gay's, 250, 
Wild, Jonathan, 91. 
Wilkes, 41, 91. 
Wilkie, Sir David, 144, 164. 
Wilkins, 234. 

William IH., King, 42, 62. 
WilHams, J., 90. 
Williams, Samuel, 173. 
Willington, James, 313, 315, 

318. 
Willmore, 144. 
Will's Coffee House, 142, 
Wills, Mr., 61, 63. 
Wilson, Richard, the painter, 

49, 9S, 99, 144, 235, 301. 
Wilton, 35. 
Wiltshire, 268. 
Windsor, 49, 197, 198. 
Wine, Gay's, 243, 
Witie and Walnuts, Hard- 
castle's, 230. 
Wine-Cellar, the, 195. 
Wititer, 237. 

Woffington, Mrs. Margaret, 34, 
Wokingham, 2"];^. 
Wolcot, 87, 96. 
Woodward, 135, 259. 
WooUett, 144, 146, 295. 



364 



General Index. 



Word to the Wise, A, Kelly's, 

27. 
Wordsworth, William, 32. 
Worlidge, the etcher, 92. 
Wornum, Mr., 196. 
Worsdale, the Lady Pent- 

weazel of, 50. 
Worsley, Lady, 299. 
Wright, Richard, 133. 
Wyatt's Pantheon, burning of, 

46. 
Wylde's Globe, 276. 



Y. 

York, the Duke of, 48, 55, 191, 

193- 
Young, Edward, Goldsmith's 
acquaintance with, 12; Night 
Thoughts, Goldsmith's inter- 
est in, 12 ; 26. 

Z. 

ZOFFANY, 42, 43. 

Zuccarelli, 228. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 760 874 1 



